Correspondence: Sauveur Giannoni, University of Corsica – UMR LISA-Campus Mariani, Avenue Jean Nicoli BP52, Corsica, 20250 Corte, France. E-mail: giannoni@univ-corse.fr

¹is a lecturer in Economics at the University of Corsica (France). He completed a PhD in Economics in 2007 with an emphasis on the relationship between tourism development and growth. His main research fields are tourism and environmental economics.

Received 27 June 2008.

Abstract

In this paper, we build a standard model of optimal growth, with exogenous population growth and technical change, for an economy specialised in tourism. Assuming that the production of tourism is pollution generating and that tourists are pollution adverse, we establish propositions regarding long-term growth and sustainability of tourism. We show that mass tourism only is associated with high growth rates and that in general, mass tourism is not sustainable. To sum up, our model shows that high growth sustainable tourism does not actually exists.