Theme: Economic impact of Climate change on the Greek Economy

Conclusion

Findings from this paper show that temperature and precipitation squared differences between Greece and the tourist origin countries have a positive and low negative long-run impact effect, respectively, in the number of tourist overnight stays. We turned next our analysis into calculating the sectoral changes caused by this fall in tourist arrivals using an I-O table. Next, we distinguished three cases of CC, namely the optimistic, moderate and pessimistic scenarios. For each of these cases, we calculated the resulted fall in the Greek GDP. Our findings show that CC could lead to a fall in Greek GDP at producer prices that will vary from 1.79 to 2.61%. Our results are close to Pintassilgo etal. (2016) for Portugal, but milder than that (their results find a GDP decrease from 2.5 to 5.2%) and than those in Barritela etal. (2006) for the world economy who estimate their worst scenario to be close to ours than their best-case scenario. Regarding carbon dioxide emissions (that stand for environmental degradation) and their positive effect on tourism and other sectors despite their negative impact on the natural environment, this is attributed to the fact that this variable captures the size of tourism flows in our model. Our results may open discussions about the possible means and measures that could hedge Greek tourism from the adverse effects of CC, for example, improving conditions of thematic tourism that have high income effects, opening up of new markets (such as the Chinese tourism market) and improving coastal zone management and water supply. Additionally, Climate change has an effect on unemployment, inflation, inequality in the Greek Economy. The climate of Greece will become drier due to the decrease in rainfall by 20-30% in the summer and by 10% in the winter. Periods of no rainfall whatsoever will be getting longer, the moisture deficit will increase by up to 12%, and an increased tendency of soil conversion to dryland in 60% of arable land will appear. This does not mean that there will be no more agricultural production in the country –it just means that the quantities produced and the sort of crops that the ground can support will be affected. Last, it would be interesting to investigate climatic parameters together with variables used traditionally in the tourism gravity models. I believe the current study could constitute the basis for future research in this direction.