Preliminary communication
MACROECONOMIC LEGITIMACY OF INVESTMENT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF GOLF TOURISM IN ISTRIA
Alen Jugović
Jasmina Gržinić
Slavko Lončar
Abstract
Besides revealing the position of Croatian golf in the world, the statistics disprove the old prejudice on golf as a game exclusively for the upper social classes because it proves golf to be a mass game, generally available to anybody in modern western Europe. Croatia is obviously underdeveloped in space and time. It is a fact that Croatia has had an excuse for a decade of lagging behind in the after-war period, but there are no excuses for being the only state without a plan, doing nothing to change that. Croatia did not learn the lesson from its tourist past on the example of tennis (which used to be considered a hobby for the rich) or nautical tourism (with millions of “ordinary” people sailing on the Adriatic today). Golf is today what tennis or nautical tourism used to be. The first part of the paper deals with the analysis of the influence of golf tourism on the extension of the tourist season, the attraction of tourists with better purchasing power, the growth of tourist offer quality, the increase in the number of tourists, growth of employment and the increase of foreign investments. Istria could greatly benefit from this concept, which should be systematically analyzed in order to get a clear picture of how justified it is to create an Istrian golf region. The second part of the paper is analzying the macroeconomic benefit arising from the development of golf in Istria. Considering the fact that the investments in the construction of the Istrian golf region have not yet begun but are only being argued in this paper, we used the historical scientific method. A dynamic projection was made giving an insight into potential changes in the GDP had the investments in golf begun in 2004 as planned.
Keywords
Macroeconomic effects; golf tourism; tourist offer; entrepreneurship; Istria; investments; GDP
Hrčak ID:
38212
URI
Publication date:
15.6.2009.
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