Is tourism an opportunity for lagging countries in the elusive quest for growth (Easterly, 2002)‘ Recent empirical … evidence suggests that the answer is a cautious yes. Aggregate cross-country data show that tourism specialization is likely to … fundamental determinants of economic growth (Acemoglu et al., 2001) and ask whether previous positive results of tourism on growth …

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 … open to trade. In other words, Tourism appears to be an independent determining factor for growth. Another finding of our …