The cruise industry is considered among the most rapidly growing alternative tourism sector worldwide, exhibiting rising demand trends over the last decades. In Greece, the origins of cruising go back to 1930s, at a time when the first Greek cruise firms introduced cruising routes in the Aegean Sea and the greater area of the Mediterranean basin. At present, the Greek cruise tourism can be considered as a significant participant in the broader East Mediterranean market. The objective of this paper is to examine whether there is a correlation, and in what extent, between the cruise passengers’ arrivals, the international airports’ arrivals and the GDP per capita for six Greek regions. For this purpose, data are collected from a range of official sources, including national accounts derived from the Hellenic Statistical Authority and the Bank of Greece, the Hellenic Ports Association and the Civil Aviation Authority and they are referred to the 2010-2016 period. Studying the statistical relationship between the three variables, we found mixed results among the examined Greek regions for the defined time intervals. Our empirical findings contribute to the existing literature by providing useful conclusions for the cruise industry’s impact on the Greek regions’ GDP growth.

It is merely evident that innovation is more in the ascendant not only in the practical field but also in theory. However, although innovation seems to be entirely discussed within different business fields, tourism -due to its “service” and “manpower” based nature-, is considered to be one of the relatively stepwise sectors. Thus, this study aims to review 235 articles indexed by SSCI, SCI, SCI-E, ESCI and SCOPUS between 1900-2019 in the context of tourism-innovation relationship. In this review, these articles are grouped under the five themes of Schumpeter (1934) as product innovation, process innovation, market innovation, input innovation and organizational innovation. Among these studies, while process innovation was found to be the most studied subject, product and service innovation was found to be the least studied subject. The most frequently used keyword was found to be innovation itself. Besides it was seen that sustainability in process innovation, perceptions of employees and managers in organizational innovation, business performance and customer satisfaction in service innovation, product development and business performance in product innovation are the most frequently used keywords all through the entire tourism literature. These findings highlight that innovation in tourism research is developing as it does in the manufacturing industry. This research might be considered as not only an opportunity for contemporary innovation executives to follow up the developments in the theory and update their practices in the sector but also an inspiration for the theorists to discover the gaps and the relatively disregarded niche areas and contribute to the future researches.

The text examines the main insights of the new sciences and disciplines, and shows how they reveal the flaws of orthodox NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMIC THEORY hacked from NEWTONIAN PHYSICS, in explaining and predicting the catastrophic events of the near economic history, and provides new ways of understanding the role of Alan Greenspan’s monetary policy of the United States [1987-2006] in the emergence of unimpeded global dominance of plutocratic intangible economy of ASSET MANAGER CAPITALISM that simultaneously produced a decade long secular stagnation in the rich world with global sharp steady increases in inequality of wealth and income distribution during and after the 2008 financial crisis. A brief history of the transition from MANAGERIAL CAPITALISM of nation states of the post-World War II institutionalized with the BRETTON WOODS AGREEMENT, to global ASSET MANAGER CAPITALISM, is presented to enlighten CHIMERICA’s evolution [China+America], and President Trump’s attempts to dismember it by enabling the emergence of a bipolar world- TECHNOLOGY COLD WAR by weaponized global interdependence. The globally interdependent techno-sphere is shown as an enabled outcome of the implementation of WASHINGTON CONCENSUS of Anglo-American ASSET MANAGER CAPITALISM, that survived a comatose near death experience in 2007-2008. The major warriors and battlegrounds of THE TECHNOLOGY COLD WAR are identified. The text shows how GAIA THEORY sheds new light on economic growth, how fuzzy logic affects the national accounts, how accounting systems over-value the assets of publicly traded multinational companies balance sheets, and how network theory reveals the value of relationships, and argues that the economy needs to be viewed as a complex, chaotic system, as scientists view nature, not as an equilibrium seeking NEWTONIAN construct.