What drives international tourism development in the Belt and Road Initiative?

As an important part of modern service, international tourism has created possibilities for employment and improvement in the balance of payments in receiving countries. This has also strengthened the degree of economic dependence among regions. In the context of international economic diversification, industrial integration, and globalization, the development of a domestic international tourism industry for a given country is inevitably affected by the performance of foreign economies. Therefore, the relationship between economic growth and tourism development has always been of primary interest in tourism economics. In order to study the dynamic relationship between regional economic growth and international tourism revenue along the Belt and Road Initiative, this study examines the annual country-level data from 1995 to 2017. A global vector autoregressive model (GVAR) is estimated, along with the impulse response and variance decomposition, to explain the interaction effect between China and other regions. The impulse response analysis shows that local economic growth has significant shock and spillover effects on international tourism revenue in the other regions, but these effects are heterogeneous across regions and do not always show positive cyclical synchronization. Results of the variance decomposition show that China?s economic growth has increasingly contributed to international tourism revenue in other regions, and that the interdependence of countries? tourism demand has become stronger. Therefore, countries along the Belt and Road Initiative should strengthen their economic cooperation, reduce barriers to tourism trade, and dynamically adjust the regulatory policies of the international tourism industry. Additionally, these countries should jointly promote the interactive development of regional economies and the international tourism industry.