How does the travel and tourism industry contribute to sustainable resource management? The moderating role of ICT in highly resource-consuming countries

This study applies moments quantile regression (MMQR) to investigate the asymmetric impact of the travel and tourist industry, information communication technologies (ICT), and economic growth on consumption-based material footprints (CMF) in high-resource consuming economies from 1995 to 2019. Preliminary tests confirm the slope heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependency, non-stationarity, and panel cointegration in sample data. The long-run coefficients show that travel and tourism industries lead to higher CMF, and ICT neutralizes these negative consequences. MMQR results imply that tourism and travel services increase CMF across major quantiles (0.25th-1.0th). However, their impact on CMF is highest under higher-order quantiles (0.9th) and lower at lower and medium-order quantities (0.25th, 0.50th, and 0.75th). The findings illustrate that digitalization leads to sustainable tourism and eventually lower resource depletion.