Causes of Sustainable Tourism Resilience in Central and Eastern Europe. The Case of Three Countries: Romania, Bulgaria and Poland

Resilience is a concept that reflects the ability to cope with change; sustainability is the ability to preserve the beneficial aspects associated with economic activity. Regarding the last decades, we assess the extent to which the resilience of sustainable tourism depends on labour market, economic growth, energy consumption, and renewable energy consumption. We used Granger causality applied to indicators correlated with sustainability (number of international tourism arrivals, labour force, GDP, total energy consumption, renewable energy consumption) for the period between 1995 and 2014. The time interval could not be extended because of the lack of recent data. The main result is that for Romania, Bulgaria and Poland the resilience of sustainable tourism depends on the indicators we analyzed, all of which playing the role of generator or “cause” for the numbers of arrivals. Bicausality was noticed for Romania and Poland and partial bicausality for Bulgaria because labour force and economic growth are not the causes of total energy consumption and neither are the number of tourists, labour force and economic growth the causes of renewable energy consumption. The resilience of sustainable tourism is dependent on the situation in other fields of activity since the tourism sector does not have the capacity for self-regeneration.