Economy and religious tourism: the phenomenon of pilgrimages to Marian sanctuaries. 2018. Dissertação (Mestrado) – Mestrado em Economia, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (Departamento de Gestão e Economia), Universidade da Beira Interior, Covilhã Portugal.

• Autor(a) principal: Belucio, Matheus
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Horizonte - Revista de Estudos de Teologia e Ciências da Religião
• Texto Completo: http://periodicos.pucminas.br/index.php/horizonte/article/view/P.2175-5841.2018v16n51p1439
• topic: pilgrimages; Marian sanctuaries; religious tourism; economy and tourism; public policies; Sciences of Religion; Theology; peregrinações; santuários marianos; turismo religioso; economia e turismo; políticas públicas; Ciência da Religião; Teorias de Linguagem; Estudos de Religião; Teologia

For centuries pilgrimages are present in Christianity. For Catholics, the importance of devotions and visits to the Marian sanctuaries is indisputable. The number of visitors and pilgrims to these temples make the local economy an important destination of religious tourism. In order to understand the economic determinants of religious tourism, two sanctuaries were studied, namely, Aparecida (Brazil) and Fatima (Portugal). Given the large collection of statistical information of the Portuguese Sanctuary, it was verified through the Vector Autoregressive model that Gross Domestic Product and Unemployment have a causal unidirectional relation with the pilgrimages. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag model revealed that an increase in Gross Domestic Product and international arrivals in the short term positively impacts the number of pilgrims. Through the Ordinary Least Squares regression, significant statistical relationships between climatic factors (rain volume and average temperature) and visitors in the Sanctuary of Fatima were found. The Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average forecast method was applied to the number of monthly  visitors to the Sanctuary of Aparecida and tothe number of pilgrims in the Sanctuary of Fatima, the results show a strong seasonality and that the first and last months of the year are periods of low demand. The results of this study allow a new look at religious tourism in the Marian context, the empirical results allow those responsible for establishing public policies, tourism agents and the administration of the Sanctuaries to direct their actions. Measures planned and executed jointly between the various agents can benefit residents, visitors, pilgrims, the tourism sector, the local economy and the Sanctuaries themselves.