The impact of COVID-19 on the tourism sector in Italy: A regional spatial perspective

The recent COVID-19 pandemic crisis affected all economic sectors, but tourism was hit the hardest. However, the resilience of tourism has also been recognized. In this context, the aim of the paper is (i) to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on tourism flows in Italy, by looking at NUTS-3 level data on national and international tourism arrivals and (ii) to understand whether, and to what extent, some “alternative” destinations benefited during the pandemic. Spatial autocorrelation analysis (global and local) and spatial regression models are used to capture the determinants of the variation in tourism flows in 2020 and 2021. Results demonstrate that tourism demand has different patterns across Italian provinces after COVID-19; both types of tourism have a significant path of spatial dependence that was stronger in 2020; international tourism has a more evident North/ South divide and, the short-term resilience depends on the characteristics of the destination.