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This study estimates tourism’s effects on economic performance at the national and regional levels, accounting explicitly for the existence of regional spillovers. The results suggest that there are important regional spillover effects on output, employment, and investment, respectively, and regions benefit differently from tourism located in the region and tourism located elsewhere in the country. The geographical pattern that emerges from the results is that the direct effects are more important in the central regions, while spillovers are more important in the northern and southern regions, the latter being one of the most important touristic regions in the country.

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This paper is concerned with examining the economic performance of the Portuguese regions Nuts III. In particular, it seeks to present empirical evidence about the degree of convergence in their economic performance since 1990 when regions became the recipients of the European Community Structural Funds. Panel data regressions are estimated and the results suggest structural differences among regions leading to the existence of different steady state levels of income. Moreover, regions are converging to different steady states at an annual rate of 2.15%. As a corollary, results suggest that national policies, while contributing to improving the country's living standards relative to the European average, might not have been able to achieve the economic cohesion of the country.Convergence, steady-state, fixed and random effects, Portugal,

This paper provides evidence of the behavior of GDP growth volatility in Portugal over the period from 1961 to 2016 with the main objective of measuring the degree of asymmetry of GDP growth rates volatility across the business cycles and its persistence over time. The methodological setting benefits from the most recent developments that recommend the consideration of structural changes in both the mean and variance and asymmetric reactions of volatility to positive and negative shocks. The results document structural changes and significant reductions of GDP growth rates volatility consistent with the "Great Moderation" phenomenon and reveal that the impact of negative shocks on volatility exceeds that of positive shocks more than 4 times over the sample period. Moreover, these asymmetries follow a rather stable pattern over the sample period, suggesting that the Portuguese economy has not been able to reduce its growth vulnerability to cyclical fluctuations.