Tourism management for financial access in Sub-Saharan Africa: inequality thresholds

ABSTRACT

The study provides insights into how tourism can be managed to improve financial access in sub-Saharan Africa. The empirical evidence is based on the generalised method of moments. To make this assessment, inequality dynamics (i.e. the Gini coefficient, the Atkinson index and Palma ratio) are interacted with tourism (tourism receipts and tourists’ arrivals) to establish inequality levels that should not be exceeded in order for tourism to promote financial access in the sampled countries. From the findings, inequality levels that should not be exceeded for tourism to promote financial access are provided: (i) 0.666 of the Atkinson index and 5.000 of the Palma ratio for tourism receipts to promote financial access and (ii) for tourist arrivals to enhance financial access, 0.586, 0.721 and 6.597 respectively, of the Gini coefficient, the Atkinson index, and the Palma ratio. Policy implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism
• management
• financial access
• inequality
• Africa
• sustainable development

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 ‘Angola; Benin; Botswana; Burkina Faso; Burundi; Cabo Verde; Cameroon; Central African Republic; Chad; Comoros; Democratic Republic of Congo; Congo Republic; Cote d'Ivoire; Eswatini; the Gambia; Ghana; Guinea; Guinea-Bissau; Kenya; Lesotho; Madagascar; Malawi; Mali; Mauritius; Mozambique; Namibia; Niger; Nigeria; Rwanda; Senegal; Sierra Leone; South Africa; Tanzania; Togo & Uganda’.

2 ‘First, the null hypothesis of the second-order Arellano and Bond autocorrelation test (AR (2)) in difference for the absence of autocorrelation in the residuals should not be rejected. Second the Sargan and Hansen over-identification restrictions (OIR) tests should not be significant because their null hypotheses are the positions that instruments are valid or not correlated with the error terms. In essence, while the Sargan OIR test is not robust but not weakened by instruments, the Hansen OIR is robust but weakened by instruments. In order to restrict identification or limit the proliferation of instruments, we have ensured that instruments are lower than the number of cross-sections in most specifications. Third, the Difference in Hansen Test (DHT) for exogeneity of instruments is also employed to assess the validity of results from the Hansen OIR test. Fourth, a Fisher test for the joint validity of estimated coefficients is also provided’ (Asongu & De Moor, 2017, p. 200).