Francesca Modena (p), Antonio Accetturo, Michele Cascarano, Petra Degasperi

We study the impact of cultural proximity on tourist flow by exploiting the cultural heterogeneity in South Tyrol, an Italian region bordering Austria and Switzerland where two linguistic groups (Italian and German) coexist. We show that the share of touristic presences by German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) positively correlates with the share of local population belonging to the German linguistic group. This result is robust to the introduction of a very fine set of geographical controls (local labor markets) and a number of municipality-level covariates. It also holds by instrumenting the share of German-speaking local population with the increase of local population in 1921-1936 when forced Italianization of South Tyrol took place under fascist regime.

Poema Isis Souza (p), Márcia Alcoforado

This paper aims to identify the existence of potential tourism clusters in the region of São Francisco River Basin, located in Northeast of Brazil. The study region is characterized by high level of poverty and problems of scarcity of water resources, due to frequent droughts. However, there are favorable factors to the economic exploitation of the historical -cultural tourism, with the presence of Archaeological heritage, ecotourism, wine tourism and nautical tourism, which may have significant effects on employment generation, income and better use of scarce water, in comparison with the agricultural activities in the region. So, Clusters identification was based on the Location Quotient (LQ) referring to year 2010. The results show that there are potential tourism clusters in the São Francisco Basin region, which are conditions of comparative advantages for the development of tourism as an important regional economic activity.