Impact of global economic crisis on global tourist traffic with special emphasis on tourism in the Republic of Serbia

Abstract

Recent decades are undoubtedly the period of large and rapid changes in the international environment. Among these changes the most obvious one was the increase in the importance of the service sector and particularly tourism, which is more and more cultural and civilizational necessity of modern man. Given the wider economic and social connotations of tourism, it has now become the 'industry without borders' or a complex multidimensional system. Its influences can most clearly be seen in the number of participants in the domestic and international tourist traffic, in the development of tourist offer and its expansion all over the world. Tourism, which is characterized by high elasticity of demand, has been influenced by global ecological, social and economic crisis. The starting assumption of this study was that the effects of the global economic crisis were less visible in tourism than in any other area, both globally and in Serbia. In this sense, the objective of this study is to illustrate the effects of the crisis on the traffic of tourists, to find the strengths and places of these effects, based on the analysis of official data. Official statistics of the WTO suggest that these effects are lower than expected. The first wave of economic crisis has led to a significant drop in the number of tourists, but tourism has shown extraordinary resilience and elasticity during the second wave of economic and financial crisis.