Performance of European projects in the field of rural tourism – comparative analysis on a sample of companies from Romania
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4316/rdt.41.3321Keywords:
economic development, European grants, rural development, rural tourismAbstract
Rural tourism is an activity that has a particularly high economic potential, representing a sustainable option for economic development. With Romania's accession to the European Union, there have been multiple funding opportunities for this sector. In the scientific literature, there are several studies that have attempted to quantify the impact that these investment subsidies have had on the tourism sector, but the results are very heterogeneous, with additional analyses being necessary to reach a consensus. Starting from this premise, this article aims to conduct an analysis of European-funded projects addressing the rural tourism sector in Romania. In order to quantify the performance of European projects aimed at developing rural tourism, we proceeded to analyze the 6.4 funding line of the National Rural Development Program 2014-2020 from Romania. Within which, projects could be submitted both in the field of rural tourism and in other fields, which allowed us to conduct several comparative analyses, the tourism sector being particularized from the perspective of most of the indicators that we considered. Our analysis focused on the financial statements of enterprises that implemented projects aimed at developing rural tourism, comparing their evolution with a control group, formed by companies operating in the field of rural tourism, but which did not benefit from investment subsidies, but also with companies from other fields of activity, in order to see a broader picture of the field.
The results obtained indicate a relatively poor performance of European projects in the field of rural tourism, the only notable effect being on the net profitability of the beneficiary enterprises, in terms of productivity and efficiency indicators, the control group recorded superior results. One of the possible causes of these poor results is most likely the process of evaluation and selection of projects which is not necessarily focused on evaluating qualitative aspects of the business plan but focuses on elements of compliance with certain result indicators of the financing program. The comparative analysis carried out with the other types of financed activities indicates that projects aimed at the development of rural tourism are not as performant, ranking last in terms of several analyzed indicators, which leads us to the conclusion that tourism financing should be carried out through dedicated financing lines, which could address to the particular needs of this sector.
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