Economic diversification of a single-asset tourism city: evidence from Antalya

Tourism Diversification and Its Implications for Smart Specialisation

“…According to the EEG, "path-dependence" is a set of territorial characteristics that define the initial conditions for regional development and therefore influence and constrain the possible future outcomes. Furthermore, tourism areas can follow different evolutionary paths (the S-shaped life cycle, a lock-in to a stable equilibrium, or an ongoing process of change and mutation) [32]. Some regions tend to develop feedback loops, leading to self-re-enforcement of their economies over time, which in turn result in increased product and market development of a particular sector followed by increasing sectoral productivity and regional prosperity.…”

“…Tourism develops inter-sectoral RV with other low-tech sectors of other industries e.g., retail and catering as well as with technology-based sectors, e.g., medicine and ICTs. Tourism growth in Antalya, Turkey, for example, has generated a diversification of some sectors of the urban economy while singling out others [32]. Diversified destination regions contain a variegated mix of small companies such as restaurants, small hotels, jewellery and souvenir shops, and shops selling clothes, bags and shoes mainly to foreign tourists, that are related to the tourism industry either directly or indirectly [33].…”

“…Other tourism sub-sectors also diversify into new ones e.g., hospitality into the self-catering accommodation sector and the events sector into festivals, diversified into the art festival sub-sector. At the regional level, sectors may diversify into sub-sectors, such as in Antalya, Turkey, where big hotels used to dominate the hospitality sector, which diversified and became less monopolized, more diversified and more competitive [32].…”

“…The more tourists visit a destination the more money they spend, the more goods and services they consume and the more investments in buildings, infrastructure and facilities are made. The money spent is earned elsewhere and therefore tourism contributes to economic growth similar to exports of goods and services [32].…”

“…The limited research on tourism diversification remains fragmented with a main focus on the regional scale; Erkus [13,[31][32][33], very little attention to the national scale focusing on success factors of tourism diversification [34] and some scope on the international scale in the context of export diversification [35,36]. Studies on tourism and smart specialisation have only emerged recently in the context of tourism sustainable development [12,37,38] and sustainable economic growth and resilience [10,39].…”