Tourism and economic growth nexus: an input output analysis in Turkey

Tourism is the world's largest industry and one of the fastest growing sectors, accounting for over one-third of the value of total worldwide services trade. Tourism, in the last few decades, has become an indispensable source of income for developing countries, Turkey in particular, and this aspect of tourism has managed to catch the attention of a number of countries, principally developing ones. The tourism literature abounds a number of studies into tourism and economic growth nexus through a variety of methods such as Granger-causality, co-integration, regression analyses. However, there are hardly any studies incorporating input-output analysis. Within this context, this study sets out to examine the tourism and economic growth nexus by means of input-output analysis, covering forward and backward linkage effects, based on the 2002 input-output table, which is the latest one released by TURKSTAT. We estimate significance of the impact of tourism on economic growth. The variables used for economic growth are income and production outputs. The findings are discussed in terms of administrative points. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer review under responsibility of Prof. Dr. Huseyin Arasli