Turismo y Crecimiento Economico: Un Analisis Empirico de Colombia (Tourism and Economic Growth: An Empirical Analysis for the Case of Colombia)

In this paper we investigate the contribution of tourism to economic growth in Colombia. We first use the growth of real GDP per capita disaggregating it into economic growth generated by tourism and by other industries. This measure gives information of past performance of tourism in Colombia indicating the fraction of the growth of real GDP that corresponds to tourism activities. Secondly, we analyse the effects of tourism expenditure in Colombia by using quarterly data and the Johansen cointegration test. We show empirical evidence suggesting the existence of one cointegrated vector among real per capita GDP, Colombian tourism expenditure and real exchange rate, where the latter two variables are weakly exogenous to the model. The Granger causality test suggests causality that positively generates in one way from tourism expenditure to real GDP per capita.