The Tourism Growth Nexus in European and Asian Countries : A Panel Data Analysis

Tourism is considered as one of the strongest determinants of economic growth and it has its multifaceted impacts on the economy of the host country. This paper aims to identify the tourism led growth hypothesis for a panel of Asian and European countries. The results of the panel unit root tests indicate that both variables are stationary at their levels. The Pedroni cointegration approach has been utilized to check the relationship among tourism growth and economic growth. The results depict that long run relationship exists among the variables. In this study we found that we have bi-directional causality among tourism growth and economic growth in the case of overall analysis while, we found uni-directional causality in the case of Asian countries. Finally, in the case of European countries we found that there is a bi-directional causality between tourism and economic growth