Capital territorial, sustentabilidade do turismo e crescimento económico regional

Resumo/Abstract: Following a brief theoretical introduction to the impacts of tourism on regional economies, a case study focused on the inter sectorial relationships within the economy of Algarve will be presented, revealing that tourism development over the last two decades contributed to the growth of the construction sector and non-tradable services, with no significant impact on agriculture, fisheries and manufacture in the region. The decline in construction activities after the international crisis of 2007 had important negative consequences on employment, revealing the lack of resilience of the regional economy. Next, a more general analysis on the relation between territorial resources, tourism competitiveness and sustainable regional growth will be presented, suggesting that regions with higher levels of specialization in tourism activities are also the less developed ones in the European context. This analysis, focused on 247 regions, is inspired by the evolutionary economic geography conceptual framework and applies spatial econometric methods (an exploratory spatial data analysis based on local and global indicators of spatial autocorrelation and a regression based on a spatial panel data model). Different types of path dependence lock-in processes are identified, with a special focus on the role of tourism in South European regions, where a rich biodiversity (measured by the territory included in Natura 2000) and abundance of cultural assets (measured by the number of sites classified by UNESCO as World Heritage) seem to be related to unsustainable processes of tourism development, based on mass tourism with low impacts on regional growth.

Outros seminários / Other seminars: Programa completo / Full programme.