Abstract
Medium-sized European cities have been playing an increasingly significant role in the economic development of countries in recent decades, establishing themselves as genuinely specialized local production systems with great potential for stimulating the economy and generating added value. In many of these cities, in addition, tourism has become an incredibly strong economic activity with the capacity to stimulate local economies, as it contributes to the enhancement of endogenous resources and the generation of a multiplier effect on other economic sectors. This paper uses a structural equation model to demonstrate, first, that a direct relationship exists between tourism development and economic development and second, that, of all cities analyzed (medium-sized cities of Andalusia, Spain), those with a higher level of tourism development are actually those showing a higher level of socioeconomic development, which confirms that tourism has great potential as a tool for endogenous development.
Highlights
Acknowledging the importance of the configuration of these types of urban structures in Andalusia, medium-sized cities are those with populations between 10,000 and 90,000 inhabitants, that show a rapid rate of population growth, that are sometimes located near large metropolitan areas whose capacities for territorial planning have been established on the basis of the role of each population center within the system of cities, and of the equipment operating as intermediate centers with the capacity to organize the environment
It is possible to identify a group of variables (Population census, Natural Population Growth, Foreign Population, Annual Personal Income Tax, Commercial Vehicles, Hotel Rooms, Apartment-Hotel Rooms, 1-Key Apartment rooms, Film Screens) showing an unusually high variance. This is explained by the existence of extreme values far from the bulk of the observations, which implies a very different evolution of the medium-sized cities analyzed as far as these variables are concerned
Twenty-nine of the relative rates of change analyzed make up the group of indicators of a latent variable that has been called “tourism development”, while the remaining thirty-three form a group of indicators related to another latent variable, referred to as
Summary
One of the major changes that have occurred within the framework of the theory of economic development over the last twenty years is the consolidation of a new paradigm known as territorial, endogenous or local development [1]. According to this paradigm, far from eliminating differences between areas, the process of globalization is stimulating the expansion of all of its forms, consistent with the new spatial logic of global capitalism [2,3,4].
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