The relationship between tourism,CO2 emissions and economic growth: a case of Mediterranean countries

This study explores the impact of tourism on economic growth considering CO₂ emissions utilizing panel data techniques for a sample of Mediterranean countries. The cointegration tests reveal that there is a positive long-run equilibrium between tourism, CO₂ emissions and economic growth. This positive long-run relationship may suggest that tourism increases the level of CO₂ emissions and has a statistically significant impact on economic growth in Mediterranean countries. Emirmahmutoglu and Kose (2011. Testing for Granger causality in heterogeneous mixed panels. Economic Modelling, 28(3), 870–876.) test results reveal that the tourism-led growth hypothesis, which suggests that tourism contributes to economic growth, is valid for Egypt, Italy, and Spain. Additionally, there exists a bidirectional relationship between tourism and economic growth both in Morocco and Turkey.     

The effect of tourism investment on tourism development and CO2 emissions: empirical evidence from the EU nations

Abstract

The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of tourism investment on tourism development and CO₂ emissions in a panel of 28 EU countries using annual data from 1990 to 2013. The empirical results from a panel cointegration test confirm the presence of long-run equilibrium relationship among the variables. The long-run elasticities indicate that tourism investment has a significant positive and negative impact on tourism development and CO₂ emissions, respectively. Finally, the short-run heterogeneous panel non-causality test results show the evidence of bidirectional causality between tourism investment and tourism revenue. These results therefore suggest that tourism investments not only increase tourism revenue but also reduce CO₂ emissions. Given these findings, we suggest the policy makers of the EU nations to initiate more effective policies to increase the tourism investments. The increasing tourism investments will allow the industry to grow further by ensuring sustainable tourism development across the EU member countries.     

Tourist arrivals,energy consumption and pollutant emissions in a developing economy–implications for sustainable tourism

Sustainable tourism management policies should aim at maximising economic benefits from tourist arrivals while minimising associated adverse impacts on the environment. This study assesses the short-run and long-run relationships between tourist arrivals, per capita economic output, emissions, energy consumption and capital formation, citing Nepal as a specific case study. We developed four hypotheses and tested them using time-series econometrics based on the autoregressive distributed lag model and Granger causality tests. The results provide strong evidence of an economy driven tourism sector where expansion in economic output leads to expansion in tourist arrivals. More tourist arrivals, in turn, generate positive impacts on gross capital formation. Energy consumption negatively affects tourist arrivals, calling for increased attention towards improving energy efficiency and energy diversity. We conclude that national policies to increase tourist arrivals should be integrated with national energy and environmental policies in order to facilitate the transition towards a sustainable tourism sector.     

An empirical study of inbound tourism demand in China: a copula-GARCH approach

This paper proposes new models for analyzing the volatility and dependence of monthly tourist arrivals to China applying a copula-GARCH approach. A desegregation of the top six origins of China inbound tourists from the period January 1994 to December 2013 is used in this study. The empirical results show that there is a strong seasonal effect in all cases and ?????? some habit persistence on monthly tourist arrival growth rate for South Korea, Russia, the United States (US), and Malaysia. Second, the volatilities of arrival growth rates to China are impacted significantly by their own short- and long-run effects, except for Russia and South Korea. Only short-run shock affects Russian arrivals while only long-run shocks are affecting South Korea arrivals. Third, the conditional dependence among different source countries is found to be positive and significant, but the conditional dependence for all considered pairs is low. Moreover, there is extreme co-movement (tail dependence) between the six major tourism source countries, suggesting the pairwise of international tourist arrivals shows a related increasing or decreasing pattern during extreme events. Implications are discussed and recommendations provided.     

The impact of tourism developments on CO2 emissions: An advanced panel data estimation

Vulnerability and interaction between tourism and climate change are among the most important issues discussed recently. In this context, this study focuses primarily on how CO₂ emissions, the main source of global warming and climate change, react to tourism developments. To this end, the impact of tourism developments on CO₂ emissions in the most visited countries is examined from 1995 to 2014 by conducting the continuously updated fully modified (CUP-FM) and the continuously updated bias-corrected (CUP-BC) estimators. Empirical results indicate that tourism arrivals have an increasing effect on CO₂ emissions, while tourism receipts have a reducing effect on CO₂ emissions. Results also reveal a possible co-movement and causal relationship between tourism developments and CO₂ emissions in the long-run.     

Quality and endogenous tourism: An empirical approach

We propose a theoretical model and an empirical study that highlight the role of quality of tourism services and endogenous tourism in long-run economic growth. We study a theoretical growth model of international trade where tourism is the growth engine and quality of tourism services has a positive impact on long-term growth. We also provide an empirical analysis to test the relation between tourism, quality and economic growth in Spain over the period 1970–2010. Our results show that in the long run, tourist arrivals, quality of tourism accommodations, and foreign GDP have a positive effect on Spanish GDP. In the short term, changes in economic growth appear to lead to growth in tourist arrivals. Our findings support a two-way causal relationship between real GDP growth and tourism growth in Spain.     

Revisiting the convergence hypothesis for tourism markets: Evidence from Turkey using the pairwise approach

This paper empirically revisits the tourism markets convergence hypothesis (Narayan, 2006) for the case of Turkey by employing the newly developed pairwise approach to the analysis of stochastic convergence ( [Pesaran, 2007] and [Pesaran et?al., 2009]). This new approach allows for unit root tests to be conducted on all possible pairs of tourist arrival differentials across Turkey’s 20 major tourist source markets, thus avoiding the need to choose a base source market or total tourist arrivals figure as the benchmark. Using monthly data over the period January 1996 to December 2009, the main finding is that despite considerable ‘co-movement’ of international tourist arrivals in Turkey, there is no evidence of long-run ‘convergence’ among Turkey’s major tourism markets. Cluster-based club convergence analyses alongside bivariate pairwise estimations confirm the lack of convergence and highlight specific tourist source markets with considerable untapped potential. These findings have profound policy implications for Turkey’s inbound tourism planning and promotion.     

Estimating the tourism induced environmental Kuznets curve in France

Abstract

France has retained its position as the world’s favourite tourism destination. Accounting for around 83 million visitors and 4.2% of the total employment, the tourism sector in France contributes to nearly 9% of the total GDP. However, as reported by the World Tourism Organization, road and air travel related to tourism activities account for approximately 10% of the total CO₂ emissions in the atmosphere, thereby contributing to severe air pollution. Thus, initiatives are necessary to prevent environmental damage that could have a corresponding detrimental effect on the tourism industry itself and slow down the country’s economic growth. This study utilises a vector error correction model (VECM) to investigate the relationship between polluting emissions, GDP levels, and tourism flows in France to test the validity of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis for the period 1995–2014. Additionally, based on a joint analysis of long-run parameters and causality links, appropriate policy strategies are proposed to promote robust and sustainable long-run economic growth.     

Asymmetric impact of oil prices,exchange rate,and inflation on tourism demand in Pakistan: new evidence from nonlinear ARDL

This study scrutinized the asymmetric impact of oil prices, exchange rate, and inflation on tourism demand in Pakistan using [Shin, Y., Yu, B., & Greenwood-Nimmo, M. (2014) Modelling asymmetric cointegration and dynamic multipliers in a nonlinear ARDL framework. In Festschrift in honor of peter schmidt (pp. 281–314). New York, NY: Springer] nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model. The NARDL bounds test examined the existence of cointegration in study variables, including CO₂ emissions, institutional quality, oil prices, exchange rate, inflation, and tourism demand. The evidence proposes that disregarding the intrinsic nonlinearities may misinform inference. The estimated NARDL model affirmed long-run negative and significant effect of CO₂ emissions on tourism demand, while institutional quality was positively associated with tourism demand. Furthermore, the findings of the study also suggested long-run asymmetric relationship between oil prices, exchange rate, inflation, and tourism demand.     

Carbon dioxide emissions from transport in Taiwan's national parks

Transport profoundly affects energy use and carbon dioxide emissions in the tourism sector. This study focuses on five national parks in Taiwan, namely Kenting National Park, Yushan National Park, Yangmingshan National Park, Taroko National Park and Sheipa National Park, and applies a bottom-up approach to determine the amount of CO₂ emissions from domestic tourism transport in 1999–2006. The CO₂ emission factor of private car derived in this study reveals a higher value than that of previous study due to its lower load factors. Moreover, CO₂ emissions per person are different in each national park, influenced by the attributes of travel distance and transport mode. The scenario analysis indicates that CO₂ emission can be reduced by increasing load factors of transport, tourist switching from private cars to public transport and going to destinations close to their points of departure, which can be achieved by authorities through activity management, regulation control and price adjustment. This is also an adequate solution for Taiwan Government owing to the increases in transport volume and the limited tourism budget.     

Examining the link between meetings,incentive, exhibitions,and conventions (MICE) and tourism demand using generalized methods of moments (GMM): the case of Singapore

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the impact of meetings, incentive, exhibitions, and conventions (MICE) on tourism demand in Singapore over a period of 10 years (2003–2012). Past studies have shown that MICE matters a great deal to host destinations but researchers have rarely conducted any empirical research to verify the significance of this sector to tourism demand. Our study intends to fill the gap by using Difference and System generalized methods of moments (GMM) estimators for dynamic panel models. Tourism demand is measured by tourist arrivals from the top 30 origins, and the influence of real income of the tourist generating country and real exchange rate is also examined. The GMM results show a significant positive relationship between tourism demand and MICE (with international meetings as proxies). Additionally, the findings reveal that tourism demand growth is significantly positive (negative) with respect to changes in income (relative prices). The coefficient of lagged tourist arrivals indicates a high level of habit persistence and revisiting.     

How stable is the tourism-led growth hypothesis in Malaysia? Evidence from disaggregated tourism markets

We contribute to the tourism-growth literature by applying the newly developed combined cointegration test and the recursive Granger causality test to re-assess the stability of the tourism-led growth hypothesis in Malaysia with respect to 12 different tourism markets. The cointegration test results suggest that economic growth of Malaysia is cointegrated with all the 12 selected tourism markets. However, the recursive Granger causality test shows that the tourism-led growth hypothesis in Malaysia is valid and stable with respect to tourist arrivals from only 8 out of the 12 tourism markets. Almost all of them are from developed countries. Hence, not all international visitor arrivals could effectively drive the growth of the Malaysian economy. In light of this, tourism marketing policies should focus more on those tourism markets that could significantly stimulate economic growth. However, there should not be total neglect of others as they potentially contribute to the economies of scale.     

Carbon footprint of tourism in Barcelona

This study evaluates the carbon footprint (CF) of Barcelona tourist activity taking into account the above 30 million visitors who visit the city every year. This study analyzes the main sources of emissions considering direct (Scope 1) and indirect emissions (Scope 2 and 3) as a consequence of energy use. This research has been carried out in close collaboration with Barcelona City Council and in the context of the new Strategic Tourism Plan for Barcelona city. The impacts of arrival and departure transport, accommodation, leisure and professional activities and Intra-urban transport from Barcelona city were all included. The total CF of Barcelona tourist activity is about 9.6MtCO₂eq/year, which represents an emission of 96.9 kg CO₂eq/visitor·day. The main source of emissions is arrival and departure transport (95.6%), and particularly aviation. These results show that if substantial reductions in CO₂ emissions are to be achieved, initiatives strategically focused on transport and also accommodation are necessary.     

Tourism growth and income inequality: does Kuznets Curve hypothesis exist in top tourist arrival countries

This study examines the relationship between tourism and the income inequality in top 43 tourist arrival countries by using the data over the period of 1995–2015. We have applied advanced econometric techniques which include cross-sectional augmented IPS (CIPS) unit root test, bootstrap co-integration, Pedroni co-integration, fully modified ordinary least squares, and heterogeneous panel causality technique. The results confirm that all the variables are co-integrated in the long run. The result also shows that the tourism has a positive effect on income inequality in full and the region-wise sample. Furthermore, the Kuznets curve hypothesis is also tested and found its existence. This concludes that if the examined countries increase their tourism revenue this will help them to reduce income inequality. This study gives valuable policy implications for the government and the policy-makers.     

Impact of unexpected events on inbound tourism demand modeling: evidence of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in South Korea

This paper attempts to evaluate how South Korea’s inbound tourist arrivals from China have been affected by the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak. Using quarterly data, the autoregressive distributed lag model (ADLM) is performed to capture the influence of the MERS outbreak. Estimation results of the general ADLM reveal that the MERS outbreak has a significant adverse impact on the total inbound tourist arrivals from China, as well as on tour arrivals; however, for business, official, and other types of tourist arrivals, its influence is insignificant. Furthermore, the error correction model is estimated to demonstrate the long-run equilibrium and short-run dynamics among the underlying variables. Our analysis not only provides empirical evidence on evaluating the impact of the MERS outbreak on different types of tourism demand, but also identifies main determinants and suggests appropriate model specifications for each type of tourist arrivals.     

Evolution of international tourist flows from 1995 to 2018: A network analysis perspective

Tourist arrivals and tourism revenues have been extensively studied to evaluate international tourist flows, whereas the structure and evolution of these flows have received less attention. Based on international tourist arrival data from 221 countries/regions during the period 1995–2018, this study applies network analysis to explore the structure and evolution of international tourist flows, and the roles and functions of countries/regions in the international tourist flow network. The results of this study reveal that the network density of international tourist flows is increasing. Countries/regions in Europe, East Asia and North America generally occupy a significantly important position within the international tourist flow network, especially Germany and China. Those geographically close countries/regions demonstrate the same or similar roles and positions in international tourism. This study has significant implications for tourist destination management and marketing.     

Do shocks have permanent or transitory effects on tourist inflow? An application of stationarity test with structural breaks: evidence reexamined for Gilgit-Baltistan,Pakistan

ABSTRACT

Do shocks affect tourist inflows permanently or temporarily? To examine this question, we consider a region in Northern Pakistan, Gilgit-Baltistan, known for its natural and scenic beauty and with a history of huge tourist inflows, both domestic and international. The tourist arrivals from significant source markets are investigated using univariate and Lagrange Multiplier (LM) unit root tests with two structural breaks to examine if shocks to the time path of visitors’ inflow are permanent or transitory. According to the results, the univariate and LM unit root test with two breaks reject the unit root null for all major source markets. The findings suggest transistory effects rather than permanent effects of shocks on the growth path of tourist arrivals to Gilgit-Baltistan. This result further predicts the sustainability of the tourism sector in the region in the long run.     

Quantifying Spanish tourism's carbon footprint: the contributions of residents and visitors: a longitudinal study

This paper develops and explains an input–output model to quantify the carbon footprint linked to residents' and visitors' tourist consumption in the Spanish economy between 1995 and 2007, thus offering a rare longitudinal review of a national carbon footprint. Two measures are calculated: a domestic one similar to the producer responsibility criterion and a total measure that includes imported intermediate and final goods, similar to the consumer responsibility measure. The important role of tourism in Spain explains why its domestic carbon footprint represented 10.6% of total CO₂ emissions in 2007. Visiting tourists represented 47% of this figure, households 36%, business tourism represented 14% and public administration expenditures 3%. By industry, transport (26%) was positioned as the highest emitter in 2007, with hotels and restaurants the second (21%) (benefitting indirectly from energy and environmental efficiency improvements over the period). The Spanish reliance on imported oil products and the growing importance of foreign-based air services has caused the total carbon footprint of tourism to increase by more than 100%. Therefore, climate change mitigation plans must include imports, and action must take place through the whole global production chain and in the transport sector, particularly air transport. Future mitigation policies are discussed.     

Educational tourism and its implications on economic growth in Malaysia

The effect of educational tourism on Malaysia’s economic growth is examined in this study by extending the Solow growth model. This study uses the sample from 2002:Q1 to 2014:Q4. The newly developed Bayer–Hanck combined tests for cointegration and the Granger causality test were employed to examine the long-run and causal relationships among the variables. The empirical findings suggest that economic growth, educational tourism, and other determinants are cointegrated. Educational tourism has a bi-directional causal relationship with economic growth in the short-run but there is a uni-directional Granger causality runs from educational tourism to economic growth. This study provides an essential insight for Malaysia to create policies that promote educational tourism, thereby encouraging economic growth in the long-run.