The Link between Economic Growth and Environmental Quality in the Case of Coastal Tourism in the Rural Areas

Carrying out many intensive human activities in different areas including closed and semi-closed basins has consequences on long-medium term, with a strong environmental impact on the coastal and marine zone degradation. In many coastal regions these aspects - on the long term - caused rapid alterations and severely influenced the sustainability of the coastal ecosystems. Urbanization, mainly produced by tourist activities, causes an increase of the overcrowding costs. It is important to observe that the relation between tourism and environment is not immediate, but it is connected, both to the changes of the production processes of tourist services, and to the changes of residents and of the tourists consumptions. If the direction of these effects is the same, an economic growth based on tourism will have positive effects. Therefore, the flows of tourists along the coasts have an important impact on the ecosystem and an approach based on the Kuznets’s Curve would allow us to highlight the relation between the cost of the environmental degradation (environmental damage or as lack of monetary incomes) and the advantages of the economic growth.