Does tourism promote or reduce environmental pollution? Evidence from major tourist arrival countries

This study aims to investigate the impact of the inbound tourism development on the environment in the top five important tourist arrival countries from 1995 to 2018. This paper studies the newly developed cointegration test that is applied to the bootstrap autoregressive distributed lag framework in order to investigate the long-run relationship. Evidence of the long-run relationship was found when carbon emissions served as dependent variables in France, the USA, and China. In the short-run relationship, the empirical results confirm that the development of China’s tourism industry and economic growth is mutually reinforcing, and there is a bidirectional impact on the economic growth and CO2 emissions. Further findings show a unidirectional impact on tourism development and CO2 emissions in the USA and Italy. The continued growth of tourism has played a vital role in the economic growth of France and China. It appears that tourism development has promoted environmental sustainability. The findings have valuable policy implications so that a sustainable tourism investment or a low-carbon economic investment can reduce CO2 emissions in the USA, France, and Italy but China must implement a sustainable tourism environmental development policy more effectively in order to reduce environmental pollution caused by tourism.