Global difference in the relationships between tourism, economic growth, CO₂ emissions, and primary energy consumption

ABSTRACT

Understanding the difference of the multi-relationships between tourism, environment, and economic growth is an effective way to reduce inequality, but little is known about multivariate differences induced by different income levels. Thus, we empirically explored these multi-relationships between tourism, economic growth, CO₂ emissions, and primary energy consumption at different development stages using a series of panel models, leading to enlightening results. A cointegration relationship exists between CO₂ emissions and all other variables in all countries selected. CO₂ emissions in low-income countries increase by 0.084% for a 1% increase in expenditure of inbound tourists per capita, and CO₂ emissions in the low-income countries and high-income countries increase by 0.072% and 0.059%, respectively, for a 1% increase in the net inflow of international tourists. In addition, the lower the income countries, the greater the impact of tourism on CO₂ emissions and the higher the income countries, the higher the number of feedback Granger causality. Our results imply that the differences in multi-relationships induced by different income levels are of great importance for government policy decisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism
• CO₂ emissions
• economic growth
• primary energy consumption
• different income countries

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

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

Xia Li http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3050-8529

Han Zhang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9251-5452

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China [grant number 2017YFA0604402]; The Key National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41531176].