Does tourism development promote ecological footprint? A nonlinear ARDL approach

ABSTRACT

In this empirical study, we explore the nonlinear (asymmetric) correspondence between tourism development and the ecological footprint of most visited countries by employing the recently introduced panel nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) approach spanning the period 1995–2017. Empirical findings affirm the significant and long-run positive impact of tourism arrivals on ecological footprint, while tourism receipts are negatively associated with environmental degradation. Results also indicate that economic growth, energy intensity, and urbanization degrade environmental quality in the long run. These empirical findings are expected to direct the government to implement appropriate tourism arrivals-related policies to promote sustainable tourism development in the most visited countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism development
• ecological footprint
• panel nonlinear ARDL
• causality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Hausman test indicates PMG is suitable for our analysis.

2. More information on the panel NARDL in the applied researches nicely delineated in the methodology section of this study.

3. The error correction term used to measure the cointegration of series in the panel ARDL.

4. We verified the existence CD before implementing NARDL as suggested by Jithin and Babu (2021) for implementing panel NARDL. However, the results are not presented due to space constraint.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohd Arshad Ansari

Mohd Arshad Ansari is a Doctoral fellow in the School of Economics, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, Telangana, India.

Muhammed Ashiq Villanthenkodath

Muhammed Ashiq Villanthenkodath is a research fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal, India.