Impactos causados pela COVID-19 no turismo português

: uma análise comparativa e da exposição do setor a choques adversos

Abstract

The year of 2020 marked the beginning of an atypical period for humanity. An extremely infectious and aggressive disease has hit the entire world, causing extreme chaos that has forced many of the countries to close their borders. It was impossible for any country to prepare for what was to come. COVID-19 attacked without announcing its arrival and had a devastating effect on the most varied sectors of the economy. This paper focuses on the tourism sector, one of the sectors most affected by COVID-19, as it has forced restrictions on mobility on an unprecedented scale. Although this dissertation favors the specific case of Portugal, a country that depends heavily on tourism for economic growth and the improvement of its current account, the work also analyzes what happened in other countries and in previous crises, in order to provide an adequate context for our results. This work is organized as follows. First, information will be presented on COVID-19 and on Portuguese tourism. With this framework in place, the dissertation analyzes the impact of COVID-19 on Portuguese tourism during 2020, makes comparisons with other European and non-European countries, analyzes the global effect of COVID-19 against other shocks experienced in the past (sanitary and others) and, finally, it presents a practical test, which assesses the tourist activity in three regions of relevance to the study: Alentejo, Lisbon and Algarve. The conclusions about COVID-19's overall negative impact on tourism are unequivocal, but the full scale of this impact and the influence it will have on the future of the tourism sector, so vulnerable to health crises and, at the same time, so crucial in its propagation, remains to be seen.

Date of Award	10 Feb 2022
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Luís Guilherme Marques Bernardes (Supervisor)