CACTUS CACTUS J Tour Bus Manag Econ CACTUS – Journal of Tourism Business, Management and Economics 2247-3297 ASE Publishing House Bucharest, Romania cactus-2014-8 Research Article L83, M2 Should countries worldwide be more interested in hosting sports mega-events? Ion Andrei andrei_pion@yahoo.com Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania 15 12 2014 10 2 15122014 Copyright © 2014, The Author(s) 2014 The Author(s) This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Tourism is nowadays recognized as an important sector that has an impact on the development of country economy. Tourism activities have a real impact on economic and social development as they contribute to the GDP and because of its role that it plays on the labor market. The ability of the national economy to benefit from tourism depends on the availability of investment to develop the necessary infrastructure and on its ability to supply the needs of tourists. Hosting sports megaevents is a theme with important impacts on the national economy. The scope of the paper is to present the impact of sports mega-events tourism on the hosting city/country. The paper also treats why sport mega-events are an attractive opportunity for countries but also what some possible loses may appear if choosing to host them.

 Keywords tourism event tourism sports events mega-events

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