Ioannis Kostakis

Understanding the entrepreneurs’ behavioural intentions towards sustainable tourism: a case study from Greece

This study’s aim is mainly to provide insights into the factors that affect sustainable tourism entrepreneurs’ behavioural intentions, employing data from Greece. Given that intention is a powerful predictor of actual behaviour, to stimulate sustainable entrepreneurial activity in the tourism sector and achieve sustainable development, it is important to study the factors that affect entrepreneur’s behavioural intentions towards sustainability. Findings through this empirical analysis support that entrepreneur’s demographics parameters and firm characteristics have distinctive effects in explaining respondents’ behaviour towards sustainable entrepreneurship and acknowledgement of sustainability options of a community. In particular, results suggest that younger entrepreneurs are probably more informed about the potential of the sustainability for the regions and are more likely to favour sustainable tourism practices. Entrepreneur’s income is also a statistical significant parameter towards sustainable entrepreneurship intentions within the tourism sector. Finally, entrepreneurs reported as important for the promotion of tourism sustainability the creation of knowledge networks and websites to focus on sustainable business and the promotion of environmental labels and certified management systems in tourism businesses.

The Greek economy under the twin-deficit pressure: a demand orientated growth approach

Abstract This paper uses an alternative growth approach in line with Thirlwall’s model in order to predict economic growth in Greece taking into account internal and external imbalances caused by public deficit/debt and lack of trade competitiveness. It is shown that the simple Thirlwall’s Law (given by the product of the ratio of the income elasticities of demand for exports and imports, and the growth of foreign demand) over-predicts real growth in Greece while the more complete extended model, makes a closer prediction which is consistent with the high deficit/debt and current account deficit experienced in this country. The simulation approach shows that the most efficient policy to attain higher growth is to reduce external imbalances while policies to reduce internal imbalances are low growth enhancing.

Public Investments, Human Capital, and Political Stability: The Triptych of Economic Success

This study assesses the effects of fiscal policy on economic growth in a sample of 96 countries from 1990 to 2010. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Extreme Bound Analysis are mainly estimated in order to investigate whether public investments, human capital, and political stability affect growth controlling for initial output and human capital levels. Furthermore, in this empirical research four subsets of independent variables were used: (a) demographic factors, (b) political determinants, (c) region variables, and (d) variables regarding macroeconomic policy. Empirical results suggest that there is an important difference in the impact of public and private sector investments on the growth of per capita income. Moreover, political indicators such as corruption control, rule of law, and government effectiveness have a high impact on economic growth. Demographic factors, including fertility rate and mortality growth, as well as several macroeconomic variables, like inflation rate index and government consumption, were estimated to be statistically significant factors of economic performance. Fiscal volatility may also be a new possible channel of macroeconomic instability that leads to lower growth. Policy implications of the findings are discussed in detail.

The Determinants of Households’ Savings During Recession: Evidence from Greece

Background: A large body of empirical research supports that fiscal policy measures have potential long term savings consequences on the households. However, a number of related issues have not yet been fully examined in the literature. A few of these studies, for instance, have addressed whether a recession leads the socio-demographic parameters to have a different impact on consumer behavior. This paper assesses empirically the relationship between the socioeconomic characteristics and the level of households’ savings in Greece due to the financial crisis in Greece. Methods: Data were drawn from 800 responders through a field survey in 2011 using the random stratified sampling technique. The empirical analysis was based on the estimation of OLS, 2SLS and Tobit regression models. Following strategies of cross section data, an anonymous structured questionnaire including information on personal and family characteristics was distributed. Results: In particular, three categories of independent variables were used in this paper, namely: a) demographic characteristics, b) economic variables and c) psychological factors. It was concluded that income is the most significant variable for saving. Furthermore, the results suggested that other statistically significant variables are marital status, educational level, type of employment and economic situation. More specifically, gender was found to be associated with the level of savings. Men were found to save more money than women. It was also estimated that more educated consumers save more. In addition, married consumers save less money while employers of the private sector used to save more money than other professional categories. Basically, this is implied because their income had not decreased this period due to the fiscal measures. Finally, psychological parameters as the consumers’ feelings of inability of covering their expenses and the pessimistic attitude about the future influence the behaviour towards households’ savings.Conclusions: Strong associations were found between demographic, socioeconomic and psychological parameters and consumer attitude in saving experimentation.