Institutional drivers of sustainability reporting in the global tourism industry

The objective of this study is to test whether institutional factors are associated with sustainability reporting adoption (i.e. presence) and the number of sustainability reports (i.e. quantity) in the tourism sector worldwide. We compiled data regarding three pillars of the institutional environment (i.e. governance, social, and environmental performance) and macroeconomic and sector-level control variables from different sources for the years from 2011 to 2016. We ran Panel Logistic and Poisson regression analyses with random effects after preliminary Pooled Logistic and Poisson regression analyses. The findings implied that the overall sustainable development of countries as measured by three indicators (i.e. governance, social, and environmental) are important forces behind a sustainable tourism industry, although they are not all encompassing. In particular, governance and ecological circumstances are more relevant than the social development of nations in disclosing sustainability information regarding the tourism industry.