  Greece constitutes a coastal country with a lot of geomorphologic, climatic,
cultural and historic peculiarities favoring the development of many aspects of
tourism. Within this framework, this article examines what are the effects of
tourism in Greece and how determinative these effects are, by applying a
macroscopic analysis on empirical data for the estimation of the contribution
of tourism in the Greek Economy. The available data regard records of the
Balance of Payments in Greece and of the major components of the Balance of the
Invisible Revenues, where a measurable aspect of tourism, the Travel or Tourism
Exchange, is included. At the time period of the available data (2000-2012) two
events of the recent Greek history are distinguished as the most significant
(the Olympic Games in the year 2004 and the economic crisis initiated in the
year 2009) and their impact on the diachronic evolution in the tourism is
discussed. Under an overall assessment, the analysis illustrated that tourism
is a sector of the Greek economy, which is described by a significant
resilience, but it seems that it has not yet been submitted to an effective
developmental plan exploiting the endogenous tourism dynamics of the country,
suggesting currently a promising investment of low risk for the economic growth
of country and the exit of the economic crisis
