Assessment of the relationship between the tourism sector development and other sectors of economy

Abstract

An assessment of a relationship between aggregated and partial indicators of the tourist sector development on one hand and other sectors of economy and society on other hand are investigated in the paper. Indicators are expressed in both direct monetary terms and rating scales. The study covers 149 countries in 2016. The results of the study indicate a positive relationship between the development of the tourist sector and the level of economic welfare of the country. This is explained by fact that tourist goods and services are subject of a second necessity and demand for they increase significantly with growth of income level. Found that there is a positive correlation between indicators of tourism sector development and indicators of quality of socio-economic environment. This may be due to fact that, on one hand, high quality socioeconomic environment stimulates visits to country; on other hand, travels stimulate growth of economy and welfare of citizens who live in territory that visited. Further analysis of aggregate of countries, divided into 4 groups by income, showed mixed results. Thus, a stronger correlation between all analysed indicators is observed in low and high-income countries, weakening in transition to averages by a sample of values. However, such a weak relationship for some countries may be a consequence of a small share of the tourism sector in the economy. This paper differs from previous researches by focusing on a large sample of countries and reveals the relationship between tourism sector development indicators and socioeconomic environment indicators. One can speak of objectivity of results obtained, since they are confirmed both using Spearman’s correlation coefficient and Kendall’s Tau correlation.