How Fast are Small Tourism Countries Growing? The 1980-2003 Evidence

We analyze the empirical relationship between growth, country size and tourism specialization by using a dataset covering the period 1980-2003. We find that small tourism countries grow significantly faster than all the other sub-groups considered in our analysis. The reason for this is neither because they are poorer than the average, nor because they are very open to trade. In other words, Tourism appears to be an independent determining factor for growth. Another finding of our paper is that small states are fast growing especially when are highly specialized in tourism. In contrast with some previous conclusions in the literature, smallness per se is not good for growth