An empirical note on tourism and sustainable development nexus

The goal of this research is to investigate the impact of tourism on sustainable development in the 10 most visited countries. For this purpose, following the STIRPAT model, the impact of urbanization, energy intensity, and tourism on the newly designed sustainable development index is examined for the period 1995-2015. In doing so, tourism is represented by two different indicators, the number of tourists and tourism receipts. In addition, the impact of tourism on economic growth is analyzed to compare the effects of tourism development on economic growth and sustainable development. While doing this, second-generation panel data methods are used to take into account the possible inter-country dependency. According to the findings obtained in the study, tourism, energy intensity, and urbanization have positive effects on economic growth. On the other hand, the effects of all three factors on the sustainable development index are negative and statistically significant. These findings indicate that the harmful effects of tourism on other dimensions of sustainable development are greater than the beneficial effects of tourism on economic growth.