Tourism and Sustainable Economic Development: Evidence from Belt and Road Countries

This study is aimed to fill an existing gap in the empirical literature by exploring the effect of tourism on sustainable economic development across Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries. BRI is one of the paramount global partnerships as it covers more than 60 percent of the global population and 30 percent of the world's GDP. Using data from 57 nations over the period of 2000-2018 and applying two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator, we show that tourism has a positive and significant effect on sustainable development, measured by adjusted net national income. In particular, moving from a country with the lowest to highest number of per capita tourist arrivals leads to a 15.2% increase in adjusted per capita income. The results also remain valid using alternative econometric estimation techniques.