The role of international tourism on energy consumption: empirical evidence from Turkey

ABSTRACT

Although tourism is one of the most critical sectors of an economy, the literature has highly ignored its role as a potential determinant of energy consumption. To fill this gap, we investigate the role of international tourism on the energy consumption of Turkey, from 1960 to 2015, in a multivariate framework. Powerful (Bayer, C., & Hanck, C. (2013). Combining non-cointegration tests. Journal of Time Series Analysis, 34(1), 83–95) cointegration and (Hacker, R. S., & Hatemi-J, A. (2006). Tests for causality between integrated variables using asymptotic and bootstrap distributions: theory and application. Applied Economics, 38(13), 1489–1500) bootstrap causality tests provide empirical evidence for the importance of the tourism sector on energy consumption for the sample investigated. Our findings can pave the way to establish sector-specific policy recommendation those will be important for several aspects such as sustainability of tourism led growth, competitiveness of the tourism sector and environmental protection.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism sector
• energy consumption
• urbanization
• trade openness
• economic growth
• Turkey

JEL CODES:

• Z3
• Q49
• F10
• O44

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In parallel with the relevant literature (Wang, Wang, Zhou, Zhu, & Lu, 2011), oil equivalent total energy use is applied as the proxy for energy consumption. The variable is defined as follows:

Total energy use refers to the use of primary energy before transformation to other end-use fuels (such as electricity and refined petroleum products). It includes energy from combustible renewables and waste - solid biomass and animal products, gas and liquid from biomass, and industrial and municipal waste (Worldbank, 2018).

2 See Sadorsky (2012).