THE TERRITORIAL TOURISM DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES AND IMPLEMENTED CROSS BORDER COOPERATION PROJECTS IN BIHOR COUNTY. AN ASSESSMENT OF THE 2007-2013 AND 2014-2020 PROGRAMMING PERIODS AND EXPLOITATION OF THE EU FUNDS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF TOURISM

Abstract

Bihor County has remarkable and various tourism resources in the frontier area which could be exploited more efficiently considering the tourism development strategies on different hierarchical levels, opportunities for investments using non-refundable financial support and the multilateral trans-frontier relationships due to its territorial location and historical and ethnical background. This study gives an insight in the relationship and consistency of development strategies, in the importance and the territorial distribution of implemented projects within Interreg IV and V Hungarian-Romanian Cross-border Cooperation Programmes, that concern tourism development in Bihor. All projects regarding Bihor were categorized through content and comparative analysis based on public documentation of Interreg Programmes which contributed to establishing three main category of winner applications: tourism development projects, indirect tourism development projects and other type of projects. The county has an exceptional position due to its high share of the number of projects and the amount of gained aid within the examined programmes, although there exist multilateral territorial inequalities in the location of project partners, in the total amount of non-refundable financial support from European Regional Development Fund and in the gained aid per capita on the level of local governments of the county. Based on the territorial distribution, mostly the urban areas and their catchment rural settlements on the eastern, central and north-western part of the county benefitted from the Interreg VI and V in case of tourism development.

Keywords

• bihor county
• tourism development strategy
• interreg
• cross-border cooperation
• territorial distribution