Does tourism influence economic growth? A dynamic panel data approach

Abstract

On average, tourism-specialized countries grow more than others. This is not consistent with the core of modern economic growth theory that suggests that economic growth is linked to sectors with high-tech intensity and large scale. In this article, we use appropriate panel data methods to study the relationship between tourism and economic growth. In general, we show that tourism is a positive determinant of economic growth both in a broad sample of countries and in a sample of poor countries. However, contrary to previous contributions, tourism is not more relevant in small countries than in a general sample.

Tourism and regional income inequality: Evidence from China

“…The results are consistent with earlier studies by Proenca and Soukiazis (2008) and Soukiazis and Proenca (2008) (Sequeira & Macas Nunes, 2008) and non-OECD and OECD countries (Lee & Chang, 2008) have also indirectly supported the above conclusion, demonstrating that tourism contributes more significantly to the economic growth of developing countries or areas than of developed economies.…”

Tourism-led growth hypothesis in the top ten tourist destinations: New evidence using the quantile-on-quantile approach

“…Nevertheless, some recent studies have explored the economic growth-tourism link using increasingly sophisticated time series methodssuch astime-varying models (Antonakakis et al, 2015a;Arslanturk et al, 2011;Balcilar et al, 2014), nonlinear models (Brida et al, 2015;Phiri, 2015;Po and Huang, 2008;Wang, 2012),time-varying copula functions (Pérez-Rodríguez et al, 2015) and a VAR-basedspillover index approach (Antonakakis et al, 2015b).Another importantline of researchhas examined the nexus between economic growth and tourism using panel data techniques for a selected group of countries (Aslan, 2013;Lee and Chang, 2008;Narayan et al, 2010;Sequeira and Nunes, 2008;Tugcu, 2014).The great majority of these panel-data-based studies provide evidence supporting the TLG hypothesis.…”

International Tourism and Economic Growth and Trade: Variance Decomposition Analysis

“…In the same year, Sequeira and Nunes [28] examined the relationship between tourism and economic growth using two estimators that they considered to be complementary: the GMM estimator. The results of showed that the size of the country does not determine the possibility of economic growth being fostered by the country's specialization in tourism.…”