Tourism is one of the world’s most important activities, generating income and employment in developing and industrialized countries. This course provides an economic perspective to the understanding of tourism. It explores several topics as demand for tourism, how tourism firms operate in national and global contexts and the effects of tourism on destination areas.
Attention is also paid to several issues such as forecasting, seasonality and destination life cycle.
At the end of the course, the student will have acquired:
(1) Knowledge and understanding: The course provides students with the fundamental theoretical and empirical tools for the economic analysis of the tourism system from a microeconomic and macroeconomic perspective.
(2) Ability to apply knowledge and understanding: once the course has been completed, students will be able to assess how and to what extent tourism influences the economic system, analyzing consumer and tourism business behaviour, analyzing demand and supply of tourist goods and services, identifying and analyzing the specific forms of competition in the tourist market, identifying costs and benefits deriving from tourist specialization.
(3) Making judgments: the course allows the student an autonomous and independent understanding of the tools, of the dynamics of the tourist market and of the economic problems that can emerge in the destinations with tourist specialization.
(4) Communication skills: the course allows students to develop the ability to accurately report issues, concepts, ideas and problems of an economic nature.
(5) Learning skills: teaching and assessment methods will enable students to acquire the capacity to apply theory and economic reasoning to empirical reality.