In this study, we examine the dynamic relationship between tourism growth and economic growth, using a newly introduced spillover index approach. Based on monthly data for 10 European countries over the period 1995-2012, our analysis reveals the following empirical regularities. First, the tourism-economic growth relationship is not stable over time in terms of both magnitude and direction, indicating that the tourism-led economic growth (TLEG) and the economic-driven tourism growth (EDTG) hypotheses are time-dependent. Second, the aforementioned relationship is also highly economic event-dependent, as it is influenced by the Great Recession of 2007 and the ongoing Eurozone debt crisis that began in 2010. Finally, the impact of these economic events is more pronounced in Cyprus, Greece, Portugal and Spain, which are the European countries that have witnessed the greatest economic downturn since 2009. Plausible explanations of these results are provided and policy implications are drawn.

We investigate spillover effects from sentiment and mood shocks on US outbound tourism demand from 1996 until 2013. We use the Index of Consumer Sentiment and Economic Policy Uncertainty Index as proxies for sentiment and the S&P500 as a proxy for mood. We find a moderate to high interrelationship among sentiment, mood and outbound tourism demand. More importantly, sentiment and mood indicators are net transmitters of spillover shocks to outbound tourism demand. The magnitude of spillover effects sourced by sentiment and mood is time-varying and depends on certain socio-economic and environmental events. Our results have important implications for policymakers and travel agents in their efforts to predict tourism arrivals from key origin countries and to plan their tourism strategy.

Despite increased emphasis on community participation in tourism planning, our current knowledge of community attitudes and their motivations to engage in such collaborative governance is limited and fragmented. This paper explores the role of heritage values, tourism and community perceptions held by destination hosts as drivers to willingness to participate in heritage tourism development. Such enquiry aims to enhance our current knowledge of community views and their potential to influence involvement in participatory decision-making in order to inform policy approaches to collaborative heritage tourism strategies. Using a relatively inexperienced destination community (Kastoria, Greece), the study collects quantitative data via an attitudinal survey. Our findings suggest that intentions to participate are mainly driven by community ideals while their positive influence is more evident on community members with high place attachment. Heritage values play a significant role; however, their effects do not always favour participation as they can also act as barriers to involvement. On the other hand, tourism perceptions are found to be mainly insignificant in shaping intentions to participate. Finally, the paper presents and discusses variations between different demographic groups and draws implications for policy.

This paper revisits the ambiguous relationship between tourism and economic growth, providing a comprehensive study of destinations across the globe which takes into account the key dynamics that influence tourism and economic performance. We focus on 113 countries over the period 1995-2014, clustered, for the first time, around six criteria that reflect their economic, political and tourism dimensions. A Panel Vector Autoregressive model is employed which, in contrast to previous studies, allows the data to reveal any tourism-economy interdependencies across these clusters, without imposing a priori the direction of causality. Overall, the economic-driven tourism growth hypothesis seems to prevail in countries which are developing, non-democratic, highly bureaucratic and have low tourism specialization. Conversely, bidirectional relationships are established for economies which are stronger, democratic and with higher levels of government effectiveness. Thus, depending on the economic, political and tourism status of a destination, different policy implications apply.

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The literature largely advocates for community participation in heritage tourism planning but there is little empirical evidence on the effectiveness of participatory management and its contribution to heritage. This study adopts an experimental approach to conduct a ceteris paribus comparison between participatory and non-participatory decision-making. The analysis relies on behavioural data on choices, deliberation and conflict studied in the context of a controlled collaborative environment. The findings provide important insights in favour of participation, offering support to previous conjectures. First, choices and deliberation between participatory and non-participatory groups exhibit no statistically significant differences, suggesting that community participation can be (equally?) as effective as (with) top-down decision-making. Second, participatory groups are more susceptible to conflict, which is nonetheless constructive rather than destructive, leading to more pro-heritage choices.Further, in participatory groups, we find positive correlations between proheritage preferences and deliberation, suggesting that the latter benefits heritage investment decisions. These findings have important implications, arguing for collaborative approaches to heritage tourism planning and less institutional anxiety towards conflict.