The contribution of economics to sustainable tourism research

Abstract

This paper aims to identify and explore the interlinkages between sustainable tourism research and the study of economics with the goal of identifying main themes and gaps in the economics of sustainable tourism. It contributes to identifying the unique perspective that economics has contributed and can still contribute towards the sustainable tourism discourse. This review article retrieved and analysed 5593 papers using scientometric analysis. The findings indicate that economic theory and/or methods have had a clear influence on some, but not all clusters of sustainable tourism research. Clusters that are dominated by economic theory and methods include economic growth, climate change, the sharing economy and evolutionary framework. Current themes in economics, including migration, declining labour shares and rising inequality have not attracted attention in sustainable tourism research. Additionally, a much clearer focus on inter- and intragenerational effects, shadow prices and dealing with externalities deserves further scrutiny. Gaps also exist in terms of laboratory studies, field experimental studies and the application of behavioural economics. This article also launches the special issue – the Economics of Sustainable Tourism – which includes ten blind-peer-reviewed papers.

Keywords:

• Sustainable tourism
• tourism economics
• sustainable development goals
• scientometric analysis
• sustainability
• economic growth

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the following persons: Firstly, Mr Lodewalt Venter who assisted with the use of CiteSpace; secondly, the anonymous reviewers who provided detailed comments and suggestions on how to improve the paper; thirdly, all the authors who contributed to this Special Edition. Without you, this edition would not have been possible. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations in the paper remain that of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See Dwyer (2020) for a discussion on Beyond GDP within the tourism development context.

2 To narrow down the search and as a robustness check, the search was also conducted when “sustainable tourism” is the theme and “econom*” only part of the author supplied keywords in the Web of Science Core Collection. This method identified 861 papers and while the main analysis in this paper focuses on the 5 593 papers, some reference will also be made to narrow search.

3 This journal is debatable – some researchers questioned its high publication charges and extremely high volume of published papers per year, but others argue that it follows a standard blind peer-review process.

4 The asterisk next to a cluster indicates that this cluster is also identified in the database of articles in the narrowly defined search. Besides these four clusters, the narrowly defined database also identifies the following four clusters (1) Environmental Quality; (2) TALC and Governance; (3) Behavioural Economics, and (4) Blue Economy.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number No.72172166)