Proceedings of Annual Spain Business Research Conference
26 - 27 May 2016, Novotel Barcelona City Hotel, Barcelona, Spain,
ISBN: 978-1-925488-05-0
An Analysis of Tourism Contribution to Economic Growth
in Turkey
Erkan Özata
The contribution of tourism to economic growth of countries is frequently discussed in
the literature. As tourism is an important source of foreign exchange earnings, it is an
important source of public revenue especially for indebted countries. Also tourism has
an opportunity to create employment when there is a slow down in the industrial
production. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of tourism on growth in
Turkey through the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach
developed by Pesaran, Shin and Smith. The analysis was carried out with quarterly
data of Real GDP, volume of international tourist arrivals and Real Exchange Rate
(RER) for the period from 2003 to 2015. The results reveals that tourism has a
positive effect on Gross Domestic Product both in the short run and long run.
Secondly the Toda-Yamamoto approach to Granger causality test is applied and a
unidirectional causality running from toursim to economic growth is determined. So it
is observed that Tourism Led Growth Hypothesis (TLGH) is supported empirically in
the case of Turkey. The tourism sector in Turkey has set annual targets of 50 million
tourist arrivals and revenues of USD 50 billion by 2023. Therefore it is crucial for the
Turkish government to achieve a stable and peacefull environment for the visitors, find
political solutions for the regional conflicts to attract more tourism arrivals and
enhance its economic growth.
Track: Economics, Tourism Economics, Economic Growth
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Dr. Erkan Özata, Anadolu University Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and
Administrative Sciences, 26470 ESKİŞEHİR / TURKEY, Email: eozata@anadolu.ecu.tr, Tel: +90 532
3828518 Fax: +90 222 3350595