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The Tourism-Led Growth Hypothesis (TLGH) posits a fundamental area of research, explored in hundreds of papers elucidating the relationship between tourism activity and economic growth. However, proposing the TLGH is not logical as the bidirectional relationship between tourism and economic growth is theoretically undeniable. In this paper, we advocate for a shift in the study perspective towards more ambitious hypotheses that extends the TLGH, which can be summarized in the Tourism as Optimal Choice Hypothesis (TOCH) and the Tourism-Led Genuine Economic Development Hypothesis (TLGDH). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the influence of business cycles and economic crises on Spain's tourism competitiveness. This competitiveness is measured by its share in world tourism. Analysing the presence of unit roots in the market share series from 1958 to 2010, the permanent effects of economic crises on competitiveness are evaluated. The evidence from standard linear unit root tests indicates that crises on Spanish market shares are highly persistent. When we account for endogenously determined structural breaks, we obtain greater support for stationarity, but breakpoints are identified with major economic crises. Therefore the main conclusion obtained is that the effects of the economic shocks are not neutral on competitiveness, with the negative effects being more persistent in highly intensive crises. These crises reinforce a natural downward trend of the Spanish world tourism market share caused by the natural emergence of new competing destinations and by the maturity of the Spain's principal tourism product. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]