Examining the relationship between tourism and CO2 emissions: evidence from APEC region

The paper investigates the relationship between tourism, energy consumption, trade openness, economic growth, and CO2 emissions for 20 economies of the APEC region from 1995 to 2017. This paper employs cross-sectional dependence with heterogeneous panel estimation techniques. The data confirms cross-sectional dependence, and the CIPS panel unit root test shows that the variables are stationary at their first differences. The Westerlund panel cointegration test affirms a long-run relationship among the variables. Tourism and trade openness have significant positive effects on CO2 emissions while economic growth and energy consumption adversely affect CO2 emissions in the long-run. The panel non-causality test reveals that there is a one-way causality running from tourism to CO2 emissions and economic growth to CO2 emissions.