Search Results (13)

The aims of this study are to analyze the tourism and air-transport industries in Africa and determine how African governments could improve the safety of tourists and local communities in this region to improve resident quality of life and tourism demand. Indeed, this study tries to improve African people’s lives through the tourism and travel sectors so that they can thrive in terms of their quality of life and happiness. The findings of the current study reveal that Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, and Tunisia are the most visited countries by international tourists; in fact, these four countries are the ones that generated the most income from international tourism in the period analyzed. Moreover, the results suggest that the tourism and air-transport industries in Africa could improve national economies, infrastructure, and resident quality of life thanks to international tourism receipts and increasing security levels around travel and tourism activities. Obviously, the tourism industry cannot be developed when there is constant insecurity, terrorism, and perpetual armed conflicts, as is the case in Nigeria, Somalia, DR Congo, Libya, Mali, and Cameroon, among many others. Security is the most important factor for a tourist destination because the safety and security of residents and tourists are the primary factors affecting tourism growth. The novelty of this research resides in its willingness to improve African people’s quality of life through air-transport and tourism activities, providing security guarantees for tourist and resident safety. This manuscript also contributes to enhancing and bootstrapping the literature on security in the travel and tourism sectors industry, particularly in Africa, where security is a priority more than a necessity. Full article

Every economic sector is susceptible to the direct or indirect effects of weather variability, and the tourism sector is no exception. In fact, the tourism industry is considered to be more vulnerable to the effects of weather variability than the general economy, with changes in weather patterns, extreme events, and environmental degradation offering substantial obstacles. Ethiopia’s tourism industry, like many others, faces challenges from weather variability. This study investigates the short- and long-term effects of weather variability on Ethiopia’s international tourism receipts. Utilizing data from 1995 to 2019, the research employs a vector error correction model to analyze the relationships between weather variables (temperature, rainfall), economic factors (GDP growth, inflation), political stability, and tourist arrivals. The findings reveal that in the long run, higher temperatures, rainfall, and inflation have negative impacts on tourism receipts, while political stability and past tourist arrivals have positive effects. Short-term trends mirror these, with the addition of GDP growth not showing a significant impact. To ensure the sustainability of tourism in Ethiopia, the study emphasizes the importance of understanding weather’s influence, developing adaptation strategies, and promoting sustainable tourism practices. Full article

Tourist activity has strategic importance in the global economy. Nevertheless, the tourism activities are linked to increased emissions, due to the sector’s energy intensity, especially in the transport and commercial sectors. The aim of this study is to analyze the relationship between final energy consumption in the whole economy, the transport, commercial and public services sectors, and the tourist activity in the 15 countries with the highest number of international tourist arrivals in the world, in 2000–2019 period. The Energy–Environment Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis extended with tourism has been tested. Obtained results show non-linear relationships between energy consumption and production levels. There is evidence in favor of the energy EKC hypothesis, and in favor of an inverted N-shaped relationship for transport and commercial and public services sectors. The results also show a positive, increasing relationship between energy consumption and tourist arrivals for the whole economy. However, there is some evidence of the tourism energy EKC hypothesis when considering the transport, commercial and public services sectors. Therefore, economies of scale are observed in these sectors. Accordingly, it is highly advisable to increase the economies of scale, coupled with a greater awareness on the use of renewable energy. Negative relationships are found between energy consumption and tourism receipts. Therefore, it is advisable to establish policies that encourage high quality tourism to control the economy’s energy consumption. Full article

This study examines the nonlinear impact of tourism development on economic growth in Southeast Asian countries using the panel kink regression model. Due to the paucity of Southeast Asian data, we may face the overparameterization problem in our model. To deal with this problem, this study proposes the Generalized Maximum Entropy (GME) estimator to estimate the unknown parameters in this nonlinear model. Several important tourism development indicators consisting of the total international arrivals, international tourism expenditure, and tourism receipts are considered. In addition, we also consider the gross capital formation and real effective exchange rate as a control variable in our nonlinear model. Our findings show that the effect of international tourist arrivals on economic growth should be separated into two regimes, while other factors do not exhibit a nonlinear relationship with Southeast Asian economic growth. Thus, we construct the empirical model with the kink effect in the variable of international tourist arrivals. To confirm the performance of the GME estimator, we compare it to the ordinary least squares and the fixed effect estimators. According to the mean squared and root means squared errors, we find that our GME estimator performs better than the ordinary least squares and the fixed effect estimators. This indicates that GME estimation is an applicable method for estimating the nonlinear effect of tourism growth on economic growth. Our empirical results show that there are positive impacts of tourism growth on economic growth for regime 1 (low tourism demand) and regime 2 (high tourism demand) with the effect of the low tourist arrivals regime being relatively larger. We also find a positive influence of gross capital formation, real effective exchange rate, international tourism expenditure, and tourism receipts on Southeast Asian economic growth. Full article

This work analyzes the tourist sector, the employment generated by the tourism industries, and its relationship with tourism receipts. The hypothesis is that there are tourist subsectors with a potentially higher level of income. The article studies the impact of the distribution of the employed population in the different subsectors of the tourism industry, controlling for the most important economic variables, on the level of income per arrival in 24 OECD countries, using panel data for the period 2008–2018. As its main result, the model indicates that the labor force that increases most the receipts per arrival is the ‘travel agencies and other reservation services’, followed by the ‘sports and recreation industry’ labor force, while having a large labor force in the ‘food and beverage’ or ‘cultural industry’ operates in the opposite direction. Full article

Tourism is vital to the success of many economies worldwide and has been a widely researched area for many years. Unfortunately, an insufficient number of studies have been conducted on this subject in the context of Saudi Arabia. Therefore, this research investigates the role of tourism in promoting economic growth in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by using annual time series data from 2003 to 2019. The study uses basic statistics, correlation coefficients, the unit root test, the Johansen co-integration test, the co-integration regression test and the Granger causality test to check the relationship between tourism and economic growth. The results show that economic growth has a long-run relationship with tourism receipts, tourism expenditures and the number of tourist arrivals; the number of tourist arrivals has a strong relationship with economic growth, compared to other parameters. The empirical results validate the concept that tourism promotes economic growth in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Full article

Using the Global Preferences Survey dataset, this paper examines the effects of six measures of preferences (altruism, negative reciprocity, patience, positive reciprocity, risk-taking, and trust) on the per capita international tourist arrivals and the per capita incoming tourist receipts. The data focus on 74 countries for the period from 1995 to 2019. The paper finds that citizens’ trust is positively related to tourism development, and its impact is statistically significant. This evidence indicates that a country with a higher level of trust in other nations’ people attracts more tourists and generates higher tourism receipts. Full article

The concept of sustainable tourism development is imposed as an inevitable way of improving the tourism industry as a whole. This study tries to offer an adequate inclusion of sustainable factors in overall tourism development efficiency results. Through the detection and estimation of potential sources of efficiency, the paper will do the efficiency benchmarking of tourism services on the level of countries as destinations. In order to complete the task, data collection was focused on 27 EU countries and five Western Balkan countries over the period from 2011 to 2017. This paper utilized an output-oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA) procedure to estimate efficiency scores for each country, and a panel data Tobit regression model to emphasize the (in)significance of each individual tourism development indicator. The results in the first stage show relatively high-efficiency scores, particularly in the case of EU 15 countries and with room for improvement in the case of the others. The second stage reveals positive and significant effects on relative tourism efficiency by the sustainability of tourism development, the share of GDP, tourist arrivals and inbound receipts, as well as visa requirements and rate of use. Policymakers should gradually take control of the mentioned variables to protect the interests of all relevant stakeholders involved in the tourism development process. Full article

Tourism has been experiencing a rapid increase in the developed world, especially in China, and resident perceptions toward tourism development have been receiving increasing attention. However, resident perceptions on a large scale and the associated affecting factors remain unknown. In this study, 63 independent samples across China were analyzed using structural equation modeling, and the effects of three factors of per capita gross domestic product (GDP), tourist receipts and length of tourism development from the perceptive of economy, society and culture, and environment were investigated. Residents demonstrated a positive attitude toward tourism development on a large scale across China. However, the resident perceptions were GDP-dependent, which indicated a lower awareness of infrastructure improvement with the increase in GDP. Meanwhile, residents became more aware of environmental deterioration and social-order disturbance with the increase in the length of tourism development and tourist receipts. In addition, tourist receipts and length of tourism development exerted indirect effects on other perceptions by affecting the perception of environmental deterioration and economic improvement. Our results implied that to minimize the effect of negative perception, attention should be paid to the optimization of the perceptions of economic improvement and environmental deterioration, and the protection of the residential environment should be viewed as a high-priority task in improving resident perceptions. Full article

Destinations are competing every day to attract more tourists and increase tourism receipts. In order to maintain tourists’ interests in the destination and expect sustainable income from tourism, understanding tourists’ perceptions of the destination is a critical task for destination managers. Tourists’ continuous visitation can be ensured when destinations are perceived to be positive and attractive. Therefore, this study examines destination attributes that are fundamental elements of the destination and tourists’ experiences. More specifically, this study investigates the destination attributes that are perceived to be positive by tourists using online reviews. Online reviews were analyzed with content analysis techniques and the quantified content was statically compared with the star rating provided by tourists. In addition, the influence of destination attributes on other conation dimensions-attitude and behavior-was analyzed. Destination attributes that have an influence on the star rating showed similar results to the attitude. However, behavior dimensions only had a significant influence for tour guides’ quality of the destination. Full article

Prior studies have suggested the existence of a reverse causality relationship between air quality and tourism development: while air quality influences tourism, dynamic segments of the tourism industry (e.g., cruising, airline, foodservice) have impacts on air quality. This reverse causality hinders a precise estimate on the effect of air pollution on tourism development within a conventional econometric framework, since the variable of air pollution is endogenous. This study estimates the impact of air pollution on the inbound tourism industry in China, by controlling for endogeneity based on a regression discontinuity design (RDD). The estimate is derived from a quasi-experiment generated by China’s Huai River Policy, which subsidizes coal for winter heating in northern Chinese cities. By analyzing data from 274 Chinese cities during the period 2009–2012, it is found that air pollution significantly reduces the international inbound tourism: an increase of PM ${}_{10}$ (particulate matter smaller than 10 $\mathsf{\mu }$ m) by 0.1 mg/m ${}^3$ will cause a decline in the tourism receipts-to-local gross domestic product (GDP) ratio by 0.45 percentage points. This study also highlights the importance of controlling for endogeneity, since the detrimental impact of air pollution would otherwise be considerably underestimated. This study further demonstrates that, although air pollution is positively correlated with the average expenditure of each tourist, it substantially depresses the number of inbound tourists. The results imply that air quality could potentially influence inbound tourists’ city destination choices. However, it is interesting to note that travelers in air polluted cities in China tend to spend more money. Full article

Although rural tourism enterprises have played crucial roles in the prosperity of tourist destinations, environmental contamination due to corporate behaviour is also an important issue to consider. In this study, we introduce corporate community involvement theory to explore the antecedents and contingency effects of corporate green behaviour for tourist destination sustainability from the perspective of tourism corporate social responsibility. Using first-hand survey data collected in Guangdong and Anhui provinces, and matching second-hand data from the statistical yearbook and tourist destination government work reports, we found that corporate community involvement has a positive impact on the green behaviour of rural tourism enterprises. This association is moderated by place identity and the gross tourism receipts of destinations. By doing so, this research extends the scope of tourism environmental governance from ‘the bottom’ (for tourists) to ‘the top’ (for tourism enterprises). Meanwhile, this research provides feasible advice to policymakers by highlighting the coordination value of enterprises’ initiative strategies (e.g., corporate community involvement) and destination contingency. Full article

By using the Emirmahmutoglu–Kose bootstrap Granger non-causality method, this study explores the directions of causality among tourist arrivals, tourism receipts, energy consumption and economic growth for the top 10 most-visited countries (France, the USA, Spain, China, Italy, Turkey, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Mexico) in the world. This study finds a variety of causal directions between the pair of analyzed variables for each country and the panel. Since cross-sectional dependence exists across the top countries for the analyzed variables, the bootstrap Granger causality test that accounts for the mentioned issue in the estimation process presumably produces reliable and accurate outputs. Further results and policy implications are discussed in this empirical study. Full article