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Biljana Petrevska

Abstract

As one of the fastest growing world industries, tourism has been detected as a source for benefiting to various sectors. Thus, each country insists on developing it and making a profit from its variety of impacts. This has been a priority task to all governments, particularly to small and developing countries as Macedonia. This paper addresses the role of government in its efforts for planning tourism development in Macedonia. Moreover, an attempt is made in assessing several key areas of governmental influence on tourism, like process of privatization, legislation, tourism promotion and fiscal policy. The paper performs different types of analyses based on available sources of secondary data and comparable quantities which are analysed by descriptive statistics. The data set generally covers a twenty year horizon and over. This empirical evidence underlines the importance of government actions as a prerequisite for well-established tourism planning process.

Key words: Tourism; Government; Tourism development; Macedonia.