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National tourism behavior and growth in Spain

Abstract:

This paper studies the behavior of the tourist demand of Spaniards in relation to the economic growth in the early years of this century. The study focuses exclusively on the resident population of Spain in order to analyze the causal relationships between the variations of the Spanish Gross Domestic Product and the tourist preferences of Spaniards. First it assesses this influence on the tourist flow of the residents in Spain distinguishing between outbound tourism and domestic tourism. A distinction between traditional tourism and rural tourism is also made. This is done using data from the quarterly national time series of the national Gross Domestic Product, the number of trips abroad, the number of internal trips, the total number of nights spent by domestic tourists in hotels and the number of nights spent by national tourists in rural tourism accommodation. The results confirm a bi-directional causality by detecting a structural break in 2008 that does not affect the relationships between the variables and does not produce alterations in the causalities.