The Relationship Between Economic Growth and International Tourısm Income: A Panel Causality Analysis

Abstract

Tourism, one of the most important sectors of the world economy, has an important place in the growth and development of the country's economies. The tourism sector is a sub-branch of the service sector and supports many sectors such as agriculture, industry and transportation. The tourism sector, which gained great momentum especially after the Second World War, rose to an important position in terms of national economies with the globalization process. In this study, the causality relationship between the annual international tourism income and economic growth for the period 1995-2019 belonging to the 7 countries (USA, France, Thailand, Germany, Italy, Japan and Australia) with the highest international tourism income in the world as of 2019 is investigated. Panel causality test is used as an empirical method, which takes into account the inter-slice dependency assumption and suggested by Emirmahmutoğlu & Köse (2011). The findings reveal that there is no causal relationship across the panel, while in some countries there is a causal relationship.