The Impact of Tourism Sector Development in the Albanian Economy

Today tourism is viewed as one of the largest and dynamically developing sectors of external economic activities in the world. The development of tourism sector is associated with considerable volumes of foreign currency inflows, new employment opportunities, infrastructure development, and new management experiences. All of these together positively contribute to the social and economic development of the countries. Beside these there are also other effects of tourism which will be considered in this paper. The aim of the research is to examine the impact of tourism sector development on the country economy. The methods of research are: analysis and synthesis of the scientific literature discussing the positive and negative impacts of tourism sector on the social and economic development of the countries; the systematic statistical data analysis of the direct contribution of the sector on the GDP and employment of Albania as a country in its infancy of development, compared to other European countries in maturity. The statistical data used in this research is provided by INSTAT (Albanian Institute of Statistics), AKT (National Tourism Agency) and TSA (Tourism Satellite Account), a methodology quantified by the UN Statistics Division for the statistical data provided for the direct contribution of Travel & Tourism.