ABSTRACT
Benefits of rapid tourism development are widely welcomed by governments of many destinations, with a growing body of literature confirming the existence of a connection between tourism and economic growth in several countries across the world. However, even if sub-national studies are deemed relevant, they are still scarce: we fill this gap by verifying if and how the tourism-led and economic-led growth hypotheses affect Italian provinces. Main findings reveal that in about one fifth of Italian provinces the two hypotheses hold, with a decreasing marginal contribution of the tourism to the economic growth once it reaches a certain threshold. Therefore, it is possible to use tourism to support economies, even if discrepancies are foreseeable among territories.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).