Exploring and Evaluating the Association between Environmental Sustainability and Economic Progress: A Cross-Country Analysis of Green Tourism

  • Sumaira Lodhi Department of Economics, Forman Christian College, Lahore, Pakistan
  • Zahid Iqbal Department of Economics, Forman Christian College, Lahore, Pakistan
  • Muhammad Salahuddin Ayyubi Department of Economics, Forman Christian College, Lahore, Pakistan
  • Zafar Manzoor Department of Economics, Forman Christian College, Lahore, Pakistan
Keywords: Environment and Growth, Tourism Economics, Threatened species, Sustainable Development, Comparative Studies of Countries, SDG 13, SDG 14, and SDG 15.

Abstract

Environment plays a critical role in sustaining the natural resources of both developed and developing countries. In this regard, climate change poses a significant threat to the entire world, depleting the natural resources of countries and making the land inhabitable. This study is a cross-sectional study. It employed ordinal regression using the least square method to examine the impact of the threatened species, environmental performance, tourism income, tourism expenditure, GDP per capita, environment related treaties, and CO2 emissions on tourism income and selected dependent variables in different clusters of 106 countries in 2019. The study included countries from Sub Sharan Africa; South and Southeast Asia; South America; Oceania; North Asia; North America; North Africa; Mesoamerica; East Asia; Caribbean Islands; and West and Central Asia. The results varied across regions and countries. The study was based on three clusters. These clusters were based on the highest number of threatened species, higher GDP per capita, and the highest environmental sustainability score on a 1-7 scale as measured by WEF. Various sources of data were used to collect secondary data including WEF reports, World Bank, UN Red List, and Atlas big.  In all three models for all the clusters, improvement in environmental performance had a positive impact on GDP per capita and tourism income. For all clusters poor climatic conditions in terms of CO2 emissions and poor environmental performance further increased the number and percentage of threatened species. A policy was proposed to protect endangered species through improved environmental conditions and quality tourism infrastructure, tourism expenditure, and increased environment related treaties.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.
Published
2023-06-30
How to Cite
Lodhi, S., Iqbal, Z., Ayyubi, M., & Manzoor, Z. (2023). Exploring and Evaluating the Association between Environmental Sustainability and Economic Progress: A Cross-Country Analysis of Green Tourism. Empirical Economic Review, 6(1), 116-145. https://doi.org/10.29145/eer.61.06
Section
Articles