Can Tourism Drive Economic Growth and Development? A Dual Perspective from Portugal’s Regions

The impact of tourism from an economic perspective has beenwidely analyzed in the empirical literature, with many works thathave studied the causal relationship between tourism andeconomic growth and, to a lesser extent, between tourism andeconomic development. Both analysis streams are characterizedby generally using an analysis approach at the country level or ingroups of countries. Contextually, the present work offers aninnovative approach by analyzing tourism’s relationship withthese variables with a regional approach, using NUTS-2 data fromPortugal from 2001-2022. In fact, this allows us to know if thecontribution of tourism to economic growth and developmentdiffers within a country. The instantaneous and Granger causalitytest results offer significant differences when a regional approachis used instead of analyzing the country as a whole. These resultswill allow the development of regional tourism policies thatenable the benefits of tourism to be channeled.