Territorial pressure and tourism contribution to GDP: The case of Italian regions

This article focuses on long-run co-movement between tourists' arrivals and per capita income with the aim of evaluating, through a macroeconomic perspective, whether its excessive increase can be detrimental to economic development. To this aim, GDP per capita in Italian NUTS2 regions is connected, through a dynamic panel cointegrating technique, to arrivals and to a measure of touristic congestion (tourism territorial pressure index). Results show that tourism contributes to the increase of per capita GDP. However, when accounting for the congestion effect, the relation appears to be nonlinear, revealing a detrimental effect on growth driven by an excessive tourism pressure on territories.