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Tourism, economic growth, and tourism-induced EKC hypothesis: evidence from the Mediterranean region

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Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship among CO2 emissions, energy consumption, economic growth and tourism development using data for a panel of 18 Mediterranean countries over the period 1995–2010. The findings from cointegrating polynomial regression indicate that the tourism-induced environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis is confirmed for three out of nine countries for which cointegration tests suggest a long-run equilibrium relationship between the examined variables. A group of causalities have been found for the Mediterranean countries. In particular, our results demonstrate bidirectional causality between GDP and tourism development for the Northern Mediterranean countries, while for the southern and global panel we document one-way causality running from tourism development to economic growth. We also show unidirectional causality running from tourism to CO2 emissions across regions. The empirical results suggest that Mediterranean countries should place more emphasis on tourism development, sustainable tourism in particular, given the potential relationship among tourism development, GDP and CO2 emissions.

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Notes

  1. Totally there are 21 countries in the Mediterranean region. Given data constraints, 18 countries were chosen for analysis.

  2. Given the sample size used in this study is relatively small, therefore the results should be interpreted with caution.

  3. The Northern Mediterranean includes Albania, Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey and the Southern Mediterranean includes Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia.

  4. For the definitions of CT and \(\hat{p}_{u}\), we refer readers to Eqs. (13) and (15) on page 953 at Wagner (2015).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions given on the earlier draft of this paper. We are very grateful to Martin Wagner of the Technical University Dortmund for providing the MATLAB codes to conduct the CPRs test. We also thank Qi Li and Karen Yan of the Texas A&M University for their helpful comments and feedbacks. Jing Gao acknowledges the financial support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC No. 71803139). Any remaining errors and omissions are of our own responsibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International School of Economics and Management, Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing, 100070, China

    Jing Gao & Wen Xu

  2. Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Canada

    Lei Zhang

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  1. Jing Gao
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Correspondence to Lei Zhang.

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Gao, J., Xu, W. & Zhang, L. Tourism, economic growth, and tourism-induced EKC hypothesis: evidence from the Mediterranean region. Empir Econ 60, 1507–1529 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-019-01787-1

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