This study aims to analyze trends in tourism economics research published to tourism and hospitality areas, and suggest research directions in the future. To this end this study searched for “tourism economics” from the database of KCI(Korea Citation Index) by Korean Research Foundation during the periods of 2002∼2020 and implemented language network analysis and visualization. Research papers of tourism economics were broadly classified by forecasting tourism demand, economic impacts, and valuation, in which major key words were derived. Results show that Journal of Tourism Sciences published the largest research papers of tourism economics(81), followed by Journal of Tourism & Leisure Research(77), Korean Journal of Hospitality & Tourism(46), Korean Journal of Tourism Research(39), International Journal of Tourism & Hospitality Research(39), and Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Studies(15). With regard to detailed fields of research papers, forecasting tourism demand was dominant, but showed a decreasing trend. Recently research papers of economic impacts indicated more increasing trend than valuation. The results of language network analysis indicate that major key words included “tourism”, “demand”, “input-output model”, “time-series”, “CVM”, “festival”, “willingness to pay(WTP)”, and “tourism demand.” The visualized results of language network show that the major key word of “tourism” was highlighted with “WTP”, “festival”, “tourist”, “multiplier”, and “time-series” during the periods of 2002∼2014. On the other hand, the major key word of “demand” was highlighted with “festival”, “tourism demand”, and “tourist“ during the periods of 2015∼2020. When comparing two periods, valuation papers were dominant in the past, but recently papers related to tourism demand and economic impacts showed an increasing trend. Furthermore, studies on festival were show a more increasing trend.