ESSAYS ON TOURISM MACROECONOMICS: Accounting for economic growth, tourism performance and environmental sustainability

Tourism is a potential source of both employment and economic growth. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism’s contribution to the economy represents 10% of the worldwide GDP as well as 10% of total employment (World Travel and Tourism Council, 2020). However, a strong signal has been given after pandemic, where tourism denotes to be resilience, since its rapid recovery observed. According to the United Nations of Tourism (UNWTO), 96% of pre-pandemic tourism performance have been achieved during 2024 season, mainly based on demand impulses. Inbound tourists reflect a growth of 11% in 2024 with respect to 2023, while it was located just 4% below the pre-pandemic levels. This recovery that may emerge a resilience characteristic of tourism system, have been observed worldwide, with heterogeneous effects (a slowly recovery in Asia Pacific – 82%, with respect to other regions whose tourism’s recoveries have been around 95% to 126%). However, with the emergence of new insights regarding sustainable development, tourism has come under scrutiny from an environmental perspective (Balsalobre-Lorente et al., 2020). Energy consumption emerges as a key indicator for assessing environmental impact, yet the integration of these dimensions remains limited (Asvanyi et al., 2017). The overall aim of the project is to study the relationship between the tourist activity with the economic growth when environmental sustainability is taken under consideration. A complete analysis of the current research status and current trends are caught. Then, an analytical framework is proposed aiming to contribute from an economic theory perspective of those relationships, complemented with empirical analyses at different aggregated levels (countries, regions and country-case-study). Results find a great evolution of scientific research on those fields, relying mostly in empirical analysis. A gap is found on what concerns to the three-indicators analyses of tourism-growth-environment. Also, theoretical contributions are found quite missing. On this latter, our theoretical analysis proposal found that the TLGH holds in a small open tourism-specialized economy, where tourism performance would enhance sustainable economic growth, with the existence of pollutant activities from productive sector. Empirically, different regimes of tourism specialization and renewable energy consumption are found within high income countries, reflecting the need to focus environmental policies on clusters found, and understanding each dynamic in separate ways. At a regional level, in the Spanish case, tourism is proof to contribute to economic growth and development, where different key factors affect in different ways to that relationship, enhancing a bunch of policies to boost economic development from tourism sector. In the particular case of Uruguay, a tourism-specialized economy, the demand of tourism, seen from its number of visitors, exhibit a high seasonal dependence, as well as the dependence of the performance of the border’s countries.