Possible affects of the developments of the Turkish tourist sector on the current accounts: A comparative analysis of the Mediterranean countries

Tourism has started to develop rapidly since the second half of the 20 th century. The share of the tourism in the world economy and also within the international trade of goods and services sold have made it one of the biggest sectors nowadays. It has a big importance for our country which is in the way of development, too. The biggest trouble of developing countries is getting foreign currencies hardly. To overcome this problem, there is an alternative for the countries which have tourism related values, to be able to get foreign currencies by offering their tourism attractions to the international tourism. The effect of the tourism is not only restricted with the currency profits. But tourism has affects to the employmentf on national economics, to the internal prices, to the balance of the income and outgo of goverment spendings, to other sectors, to the rate of currency and to the investments, too. In this study, influence of tourism to get currency and its possible contributions to the current accounts were particularly studied. These effects have not been only investigated for our country, but also a comparative analysis of the Mediterranean countries, which can be counted as our rivals, has been performed. The tourism sector which has rapidly developed in Türkiye since 1983 is gradually increasing its significance over the economy. That significance is not only over the current accounts, but it is also significant over it's share in the GNP and on the total employment.In the study it's revealed that, if we haven't got increasing amounts of the currency profits every year by the tourism sector, the gaps of the current accounts will increase in a large scale. We can seperate the Mediterranean countries-that are taken as the investigation subject-in two ways: The developed countries and the developing ones. It was seen that the tourism currency profits are important in the way of current accounts for both group of the countries with no exception. However it was found out that this has a great importance much more for the developing countries. For that reason, Türkiye and other similar Mediterranean countries, which have not used its tourism potentials at an optimum level so far, have a chance to get the balance of current accounts by increasing their tourism currency.