Convergence in the Tourism Sector at the Local Level: Empirical Evidence from the EU Regions

Abstract

In this study, we verify the hypothesis of convergence in the tourism sector across the regions of the enlarged EU. The tourism sector is measured by four variables: arrivals of residents, arrivals of non-residents, nights spent by residents and nights spent by non-residents and measure the intensity of tourist visits in a given region. Our analysis covers 272 regions of the EU28 countries with the analyzed period 1995-2014. The original time series have been divided by the number of population to be expressed per thousand of inhabitants. The results indicate that the tourism variables were developing in line with the - and σ-convergence hypotheses. The results for conditional β-convergence give some additional information about the impact of the other determinants on the growth rate in the number and the length of tourist visits.