Impact of tourism on CO₂ emission: evidence from Pakistan

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission–tourist arrival–growth in Pakistan by taking time series data from the period of 1972 to 2013. The study applied three approaches of co-integration (autoregressive distributed lag bounds test, Johansen and Juselius and Gregory and Hansen structural break test) to confirm the valid long-run positive interaction between CO₂ emission and tourist arrivals. The robustness of cointegrating vectors is further checked using fully modified ordinary least square and dynamic ordinary least square tests and results validate the long-run coefficients. The results of variance decomposition method exhibit the uni-directional causality between CO₂ emission and tourist arrivals running from tourist arrival to CO₂ emission. It was therefore noted that policies which moderate the influence of tourism development to emission are necessary for reducing the harmful effect of tourist activities and also to increase the impact of tourism upon the economic growth. The study may guide policy-makers in formulating categorical energy and tourism development policies for sustainable growth for long periods.

KEYWORDS:

• Sustainable development
• CO₂ emission
• energy
• tourism
• economic growth
• co-integration
• Pakistan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.