Tourism, Real Effective Exchange Rate and Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence for Croatia

The aim of this paper is to examine the long-run and short-run relationship between tourism, real effective exchange rate and economic growth in Croatia. The econometric framework used for analysis is the Johansen Maximum Likelihood cointegration technique. For testing the stability of long-run equilibrium relationship vector error correction model technique has been applied on a quarterly data set covering the period 1996-2013. The main findings of the paper confirm the stability of the long-run equilibrium relationship between tourist arrivals (ARRIVAL), openness of the economy (OPEN) and real effective exchange rate as independent variable and gross domestic product (GDP) as dependent variable in Croatia. Furthermore, the results indicate short-run causality between OPEN and GDP, as well as between real effective exchange rate and GDP. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.