EFFECTS OF TOURISM DEVELOPMENT ON THE ECONOMY OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Abstract

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) used to be an attractive tourist destination, which existed within the former Yugoslavia, and experienced a real collapse of tourism development after the war in the 1990s. The recovery process required, above all, the establishment of general stability and harmonization of interests of three constituent nations. That is the reason why the focus on general economic and social progress has been present for years, and tourism as an economic branch has been placed on the margins of development plans. The subject of this research is tourism as a facilitator of the development of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The main aim is to present the direct and indirect contributions of tourism to the development of the national economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It required the collection of data using classical scientific research methods, and then processing using statistical techniques. The purpose is to provide the insight into the strength and direction of correlation between individual categories in the balance of payments through correlation regression analysis. In addition, the analysis of the impact of tourism on investment, employment and gross domestic product was performed. This paper answers the question whether tourism in Bosnia and Herzegovina stimulates economic development and whether economic development enables the development of tourism.