Tourism Specialization and Economic Development: Evidence from the Unesco World Heritage List

25 Pages Posted: 19 Aug 2009

See all articles by Rabah Arezki

Rabah Arezki

World Bank - African Development Bank

Reda Cherif

International Monetary Fund (IMF)

John Piotrowski

International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Date Written: August 2009

Abstract

The present paper investigates whether tourism specialization is a viable strategy for development. We estimate standard growth equations augmented with a variable measuring tourism specialization using instrumental variables techniques for a large cross-section of countries for the period 1980-2002. We introduce an instrument for tourism based on the UNESCO World Heritage List. We find that there is a positive relationship between the extent of tourism specialization and economic growth. An increase of one standard deviation in the share of tourism in exports leads to about 0.5 percentage point in additional annual growth, everything else being constant. Our result holds against a large array of robustness checks.

Keywords: Cross country analysis, Development, Economic growth, Economic models, Time series, Tourism

Suggested Citation

Arezki, Rabah and Cherif, Reda and Piotrowski, John, Tourism Specialization and Economic Development: Evidence from the Unesco World Heritage List (August 2009). IMF Working Paper No. 09/176, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1457599

Rabah Arezki (Contact Author)

World Bank - African Development Bank ( email )

15 Avenue du Ghana
P.O.Box 323-1002
Tunis-Belvedère
Tunisia

Reda Cherif

International Monetary Fund (IMF) ( email )

700 19th Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20431
United States

John Piotrowski

International Monetary Fund (IMF) ( email )

700 19th Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20431
United States

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