The role of local tourism tax revenue in the region of North Hungary

Abstract

There is hardly any settlement today that does not see tourism as a great opportunity. In most of the cases, the lack of finance causes the biggest difficulty. This is especially true to one of the least developed regions of the country, Northern Hungary. Although, taking stock of its various attractions such as health and thermal spas, climatic medical resorts, world heritage sites, wine regions, historic towns, religious and historic memorial sites, national parks, mountain resorts, we find a rather diverse offer for the visitors. The missing capital for developments may possibly be drawn from the income from tourism tax. We show in our study that there is an unfortunately low number (one-fifth) of municipalities in the region which actually utilize their legally granted right to tax. Higher incomes from tourism tax are characteristic to Heves County in general, and on the level of municipalities, to those settlements which are historic towns, spas or popular mountain resorts. However, it can not be claimed in a straightforward way that this tourism tax induces development in the tourism sector.  There are some settlements where significant increase in terms of certain indicators of tourism development is matched with a considerable income from tourism tax (e.g. Mezőkövesd, Uppony, Regéc, etc.). Nevertheless, there is no such significant connection in most of the cases. What can be still acknowledged is that where there has been an obvious expansion of the sector, there will be higher incomes from the tourism tax. This in turn, can possibly help the local governments invest more in tourism development.