Do rural development program measures for the encouragement of rural tourism work? : a spatial econometric analysis

This paper analyses the impact of Rural Development Program (RDP) measures focusing on tourism have on the growth of tourism and on the economy in rural areas. We first explored tourism in NUT2 regions in the EU with a spatial data analyses and then we applied spatial econometric analyses on tourism where we take into account the RDP spending on the measures that encourage tourism. For the spatial regression analyses, we use the indicators of the CMEF framework. The data were collected from Eurostat. The spending on the RDP measure 313 encouragement of tourism is not uniformly distributed over the NUTS 2 regions in the EU. The spatial analyses of tourism measured by the number of nights spent by non-residents showed the presence of spatial dependencies in tourism. Based on the spatial dependency tests of the classical regression model, a spatial error model is estimated. The number of bed places positively affected the total number of night spent by non-residents. RDP spending on encouraging tourism did not have a significant impact on tourism.