STUDY ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF ADVENTURE TOURISM IN ROMANIA.

Today the world faces a lot of problems: an unstable economy that leads to joblessness, population growth, but also to a poor population in some areas of the world, environmental degradation, political instability, etc. All these problems could be alleviated in some countries, and they could be further alleviated through the income generated by tourism development. One form of tourism that does not necessarily require high investments is adventure tourism, which must be practiced responsibly precisely because it is close to nature and because we do not want to destroy this nature that is already in imbalance. This requires responsible behavior and government policies that ensure sustainable tourism. In this paper we intend to analyze the place that adventure tourism occupies among developed countries and developing countries starting from the existing data for the period 2010-2018. We will analyze how this ranking has changed over time, but also the ways in which Romania could develop adventure tourism. The working methodology involved the revision of the specialized literature on the definition of adventure tourism and the way of calculating the Adventure Tourism Development Index, the collection of data from various international databases, their processing, so that based on the analysis we could draw conclusions regarding the development stage of adventure tourism in Romania and its development prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]