TOURISM PHENOMENON IN THE POST-CRISIS ECONOMY

Tourism is an important economic activity in most countries around the world. Tourism industry is recognized as a sector which support and sustain economic growth. For many developing countries, and not only, tourism is one of the main sources of foreign exchange income and the number one export category, creating much needed employment and opportunities for development. Viewed as an export industry of three G's: get them in, get their money, and get them out, tourism has assisted many developing countries to move away from a dependency on agriculture and manufacturing. In 2012, the total impact of the tourism industry contributed with 9% of global GDP, having a value of over 6.6 trillion US dollars and 260 million jobs. Over the time, various methods and instrument were developed with the aim of measuring tourism contribution to economic growth of a country, namely input-output analysis, computable general equilibrium, tourism satellite account, econometric models, survey techniques and so on. For each of this instrument an important amount of data are necessary in order to comprise the economic growth induced by tourism.