Evaluating the Contribution of Tourism to Economic Growth

In a recent work, Ivanov and Webster (2007) present a methodology for measuring the contribution of tourism to economic growth and apply this methodology to the cases of Cyprus, Greece and Spain. The method uses the growth of real GDP per capita as a measure of economic growth and disaggregates it into economic growth generated by tourism and economic growth generated by other industries. Our paper selects a group of Latin-Americans countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Mexico. This allows us to establish a first comparison based on geographical parameters (European countries vs. Latin American countries). Whilst Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay present a profile where tourism industry has a smaller weight on GDP (2,5%; 1,5%; 1,6%, respectively) in Mexico the tourism contribution to GDP is about 4,8%.