Abstract
Benefits of rapid tourism development are widely welcomed by governments of many destinations, with a growing body of literature confirming the existence of a connection between tourism and economic growth in several countries across the world. However, even if sub-national studies are deemed relevant, they are still scarce: we fill this gap by verifying if and how the tourism-led and economic-led growth hypotheses affect Italian provinces. Main findings reveal that in about one fifth of Italian provinces the two hypotheses hold, with a decreasing marginal contribution of the tourism to the economic growth once it reaches a certain threshold. Therefore, it is possible to use tourism to support economies, even if discrepancies are foreseeable among territories.
