This research aims to study the growth of productivity in the service sector in the former Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) and their determinants. For this purpose, non-parametric frontier techniques were used to measure the variations in productivity and determine the explanatory factors of these changes in total factor productivity; the methodology of the Malmquist index with output orientation and its decomposition in technical change, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency was used for the period 2000–2019. The results obtained indicate that the productivity of services in the most recently incorporated countries grew by 1.3 per 100 on average per year compared to 1.6 per 100 in manufacturing. The most important driver of such growth was found to be improvement in technical change (frontier shift) rather than improvement in efficiency.

The impact of tourism from an economic perspective has been widely analyzed in the empirical literature, with many works that have studied the causal relationship between tourism and economic growth and, to a lesser extent, between tourism and economic development. Both analysis streams are characterized by generally using an analysis approach at the country level or in groups of countries. Contextually, the present work offers an innovative approach by analyzing tourism's relationship with these variables with a regional approach, using NUTS-2 data from Portugal from 2001-2022. In fact, this allows us to know if the contribution of tourism to economic growth and development differs within a country. The instantaneous and Granger causality test results offer significant differences when a regional approach is used instead of analyzing the country as a whole. These results will allow the development of regional tourism policies that enable the benefits of tourism to be channeled.