THE RELEVANCE OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE PORTUGUESE TOURISM DEVELOPMENT

• Autor(a) principal: Oliveira, Ermelinda
• Data de Publicação: 2008
• Outros Autores: Manso, Pires
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10314/998
• topic: social responsibility; social accounting; economic cycles; tourism development

The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is an instrument to promote the sustainable development of the corporations and of the society. In fact, the need to implement models of sustainable development that are efficient, effective and propitiators of a balanced development of the society, has been focusing the attention of the national and international researchers of these themes. Over the last decade the tourism industry assumed a primordial role in the promotion of the economic development at the national and international levels. However, many times, the concept of development is reduced to the concept of growth and although both concepts reflect an increase action we know that the concept of development integrates a life conditions improvement, i.e., a change to a higher level of economic and social well-being. If in one hand, the subjects relating to tourism are, generally, analysed in the economic and market aspects, instead of the social and environmental aspects. On the other hand, it is unquestionable the need of tourist firms that are developing socially responsible actions in order to define strategies for the implementation of the Corporate Social Responsibility behaviour. Thus, this paper studies the explanatory factors of these developments in Portugal, as well as the state of maturation of the Portuguese economic cycles to help the tourism sector on a macroeconomic perspective. The main variable is the number of nights spent in hotels in Portugal, during the period 1981 to 2007 whose values were published in Portugal by the INE the Portuguese Institute of Statistics. Additionally, this paper tries also to reflect the dynamics and the influence that the Corporate Social Responsibility has in the Portuguese tourist cluster and its development.