O57 - Comparative Studies of CountriesReturn

It is widely recognized that a rapid increase in foreign direct investment leads to an increase in tourism at different levels. This paper applied a Granger Causality test to investigate the causal relationship between International Tourist Arrivals (ITA) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) across countries. By using time series data from six countries in the top ten European destinations (France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Turkey, and the United Kingdom) for the 1980-2014 period, the findings reveal that there is a unidirectional causality between ITA and FDI. The results are strongly proven with the same results when the lag between FDI and ITA is lengthened at lag 1. Moreover, the outcome evidence has a unidirectional relationship running from FDI to ITA when GDP is added as the controlling variable.

Europe 2020 is a set of eight indicators used by the European Commission for monitoring headline targets of the Strategy for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth, which is considered to be the successor of the Lisbon Strategy. Values of these indicators vary among the European countries. Because some countries can be identified as outliers, robust regression as an acceptable analytic tool was applied. The aim of the paper is to construct relevant regression models for each Europe 2020 indicator as a dependent variable. The targets of the Europe 2020 indicators can be achieved by targeting some specific economic, social and environmental indicators.