Tourism Economics: A Discipline of Economics

Abstract

We contribute to the debate on whether tourism should be considered a discipline or just a field of study. By re-arranging Hirst's four criteria (1974) to define a primary form of knowledge (a discipline), we affirm that tourism economics can be considered an established economic discipline in applied economics. Since the same question should be posed for the other disciplines which are interested in tourism, research into tourism could be interpreted as the logical union of different species disciplines. This conclusion allow us to invert Tribe's affirmation (2004) and affirm that tourism studies are a discipline, not of the species nor of the genre type, but as a convergence discipline of species disciplines belonging to different genre disciplines.

Keywords: tourism studies, tourism economics, applied economics, discipline

JEL Classification: L1, L83, R3, R5