INFLUENCE OF TOURISM SECTOR IN ALBANIAN GDP: STIMATION USING MULTIPLE REGRESSION METHOD

During last years, tourism sector has significantly increased in Albania, since after year 1990 Albania has passed from a centralized economy to a liberal one. Tourism sector plays an important role in economic and social development. The contributions of this sector reflect directly into the generation of national income. The two main components matching the tourism movements are the number of tourists and the number of overnights in hotels. Investments done in this sector could be expected to have high positive influence in the country's GDP. This study seeks to identify the influence of tourists, their overnights in hotels and capital investment spending by all sectors directly involved in tourism sector on tourism total contribution to gross domestic product of Albania during 1996-2009. A regression analysis has been performed taking as dependent variable GDP generated by tourism sector and as independent variables, capital investment, tourist number and overnights in hotels. Even if all the variables have been found to be positivlye related, the variable ‘overnights of foreigners and Albanians in hotels' have beenfound insignificant.