Empirical assessment of the tourism-led growth hypothesis: the case of the “Tirol-Südtirol-Trentino†Europaregion

The use of cointegration tests has become very popular in the empirical analysis of the tourism-led growth hypothesis (TLGH). It was first introduced in the tourism economics literature by Balaguer and Cantavella-Jordà (2002) and then popularized by many researches which tried to assess the causal long-run relationship between international tourism and economic growth. The vast majority of these studies analyzed countries where tourism is one of the most important sector of the national economy and, in most cases, the TLGH has been validated. With respect to previous contributions to the literature, this paper investigates the TLGH for subnational transfrontier economies, namely the three administrative areas forming the “Tirol-Südtirol-Trentino†Europaregion. The direct comparison amongst the results for across-the-border regions which have a similar international tourism market provides new insights in the understanding of tourism-led growth hypothesis. Length: 25 pages