Tourism intensity and regional demographic resilience: Non-linearity without a demographic carrying capacity in European regions

Tourism intensity is often seen as a buffer against regional demographic decline after industrial shocks, but a growing overtourism literature suggests this protective role may weaken or reverse beyond a threshold. Whether such reversal materialises regionally, and whether population and output respond alike, remains unsettled. This paper examines how pre-existing tourism intensity moderates regions’ demographic response to employment shocks, contrasting it with the response of regional output, attending to the functional form of both relationships across the intensity distribution. Using a panel of 668 NUTS3 regions in Germany, Spain, France and Italy (2001–2022), a Bartik shift-share instrument, and semiparametric estimation, we find that tourism moderates demographic loss non-linearly but without a carrying capacity: the effect stays positive throughout, while its effect on output is linear and increasing. This divergence implies output-based assessments of tourism-led development capture only part of its regional effects, relevant for cohesion-fund allocation in mature destinations.