The asymmetric effect eco-innovation and tourism towards carbon neutrality target in Turkey

After the Paris Climate Conference (Conference of the Paris COP21), emerging countries also start progressing as the world has shown serious concern towards carbon neutrality targets. In doing this, the tourism and hospitality businesses have also emerged as an industry that has shown tremendous economic positive outputs and support to an economy with the lease inputs. However, tourism has also been reported to lead to increased environmental degradation as foreigners came to the host country, whereby ecological innovation emerged as a potential solution for eliminating the level of carbon emissions. In contrast, researchers are in agreement in terms of its beneficial relationship. Therefore, based on Turkey as the contextual gap and the application of quantile autoregressive distributed lag (QARDL) as the methodological contribution, the present study explores the relationship of tourism and ecological innovation within the framework of Environment Kuznets Curve (EKC) on the environment using two different proxies (carbon emissions and ecological footprint) spanning from 1995 to 2018. The results confirm the EKC curve whereby the parameter estimating tourism and ecological innovation on carbon emissions and ecological footprint, both of the integrations are found negative and statistically significant across most quantiles. Based on the findings, the study is accordingly concluded, followed by the managerial implications.