Exploring the effects of international tourism on China's economic growth, energy consumption and environmental pollution: Evidence from a regional panel analysis

This study explores the effects of international tourism on China's economic growth, energy consumption, and environmental pollution as proxied by CO₂ emissions in a multivariate framework using regional panel data over the period 1995-2011. Our findings suggest that the tourism-induced EKC hypothesis does not exist in central China and is merely weakly supported in eastern and western China. However, results show that tourism has a negative impact on CO₂ emissions in the eastern region, which contradicts with our perception to some extent. Panel causality tests show that the directions of causality in both short and long runs are mixed among regions. Nevertheless, our findings reveal that tourism causally affects economic growth and CO₂ emissions in the long run, thus tourism led growth hypothesis is verified under all three scenarios. Our findings also suggest that in all three regions there is bidirectional causality between economic growth and CO₂ emissions. Overall these results imply that low-carbon tourism in China should be continuously supported which provides significant insights to policy makers at various government levels.