The Criticality of Tourism Development, Economic Complexity, and Country Security on Ecological Footprint

Abstract

What kinds of countries are likely to be prosperous and have a sustainable environment at the same time? How might countries reorient their policy setting to be more capable of suppressing environmental degradation? To explore these questions, this research takes the six major kinds of ecological footprint (EF) as indicators of environmental quality and probes the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. We find that tourism development corresponds to more usage of carbon absorption land and cropland. Second, the lower (higher) a nation’s security is, the better (worse) is its the environmental quality. Third, economic complexity worsens environmental quality and does not effectively resolve environmental degradation. Fourth, country security weakens the negative influence of tourism development (economic complexity) on environmental quality. Fifth, increasing tourist arrivals should reach a specific level in order to raise the ecological footprint, which leads to greater environmental sacrifice. Sixth, the inverted U-shape relationship of economic complexity at the lowest to intermediate cropland quantiles supports the economic complexity-induced EKC hypothesis. Seventh, the country security-induced EKC hypothesis is supported in some specific EF quantiles. Finally, we show that tourism arrivals, economic complexity, and country security have varying impacts across diverse ecological footprint quantiles.