Specializing in tourism is an option available to a number of less developed countries and regions. But is it a good option? To answer this question, we have compared the relative growth performance of 14 "tourism countries" within a sample of 143 countries, observed during the period 1980-95....

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 be associated with higher per capita GDP growth rates...

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 be associated with higher per capita GDP growth rates...

International data on per-capita income show that, in the last few years, growth in some countries specialized in tourism was faster than in the average country included in the World Bank-World Development Indicators. Fast growth in tourism countries might be due to fast, unsustainable...

Having grown faster than world GDP since the 1950s, international tourism is today one of the most important tradable sectors, with expenditure on tourist goods and services representing some 8% of total world export receipts and 5% of world GDP. Starting from a broad perspective, two main facts...

We evaluate the demand for long term care (LTC) insurance prospects in a stated preference context, by means of the results of a choice experiment carried out on a representative sample of the Emilia-Romagna population. Choice modelling techniques have not been used yet for studying the demand...

This paper studies the preferences of tourists visiting the island of Sardinia (Italy), by means of a choice modelling approach. The focus is on some specific demand-enhancing effects which should confirm the feasibility of implementing sustainable tourism policies. Multinomial logit estimations...

This paper analyses the effects on consumers' welfare of the privatisation policy carried out in the UK since 1979. The approach we follow sees the privatisation of a State owned enterprise within the broader framework of the "policy reform" theory (Drèze and Stern, 1990). By adopting this...

Free patient mobility among autonomous providers has been often considered an effective stimulus for enhancing healthcare. However, some jurisdictions may underperform due to the existence of economies of scale and spatial spillovers. Where regions assume the costs of providing care to...

This paper surveys the recent literature devoted to the analysis of the interactions between the adoption of voluntary or negotiated agreements as a tool of environmental policy and market structure. The goal of this survey is twofold. On the one hand, we would like to identify the market...