Does the belt and road initiative boost tourism economy?

ABSTRACT

Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on tourism has yet to be tested. This paper adopts the propensity score matching and difference-in-differences methods to study the impact of BRI on tourism economy using a panel data set of 155 countries from 2000 to 2017. Results show that BRI significantly increases the number of inbound tourists (17.2%) and inbound tourism revenue (8.0%). This conclusion remains valid after a robustness test. There are regional differences although it has a positive impact on inbound tourists in South Asia, Western Asia and Middle East. The results provide important information for tourism marketing.

KEYWORDS:

• The belt and road initiative
• propensity score matching
• difference-in-differences
• tourism economy
• inbound tourists
• inbound tourism revenue
• robustness test
• regional differences
• tourism marketing
• South Asia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Hong Shi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4597-408X