| Abstract: |
This study empirically examines the effect of tourism and ICT on inclusive
development. Inclusive development is approached as human development adjusted
for environmental sustainability; ICT is based on mobile phones subscription
rate, internet penetration and fixed broadband subscription and a composite
indicator of these, while tourism is approached as a the number of arrivals.
The data are collected for 142 countries globally between the 2000-2019 period
and the regression methodologies involve the POLS, the Driscoll and Kraay
estimator, the Mean Group, the System GMM and the fixed effects Tobit
regression. The results of the linear model show that, tourism enhances
sustainable development and ICT has a negative significant effect. While the
effect of tourism is robust across income groups, regional groupings and
regression methodologies, the effect of ICT varies across these different
specifications. When non-linearity is considered, the effects of both ICT and
tourism are positive and robustly non-linear. The non-linear effect of tourism
is not however feasible across income groups. Besides, while the effect of
tourism is positively and non-lineally related to sustainable development in
politically-stable economies, the effect is non-significant in unstable
economies. From the results, countries should seize the opportunity offered by
the tourism sector and ICT as effective policy tools towards sustainable
development. In this regard, countries should invest in both ICT and tourism
while observing the thresholds where complementary policies should be used.
Also, politically-unstable economies should engage in peace talks such that
they could join their politically-stable counterparts in benefiting from the
positive economic effects offered by tourism and ICT. |