Tourism Specialization and Economic Development: Evidence from the Unesco World Heritage List

By Rabah Arezki, Reda Cherif, John M. Piotrowski. Social Science Research Network, 2009

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The present paper investigates whether tourism specialization is a viable strategy for development. We estimate standard growth equations augmented with a variable measuring tourism specialization using instrumental variables techniques for a large cross-section of countries for the period 1980-2002. We introduce an instrument for tourism based on the UNESCO World Heritage List. We find that there is a positive relationship between the extent of tourism specialization and economic growth. An increase of one standard deviation in the share of tourism in exports leads to about 0.5 percentage point in additional annual growth, everything else being constant. Our result holds against a large array of robustness checks.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f2d7c97df031b478fdcab89aa46f6c9ce8619fd

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Citations in the corpus

The economic growth impact of tourism in Small Island Developing States—evidence from the Caribbean (2018, background): “For instance, Arezki et al. (2009) found that tourism led to an annual average increase in growth of about 0.5 percentage points. Our results are more in line with those of Sequeira and Nunes (2008) with a range between 0.03% and 0.05% and Fayissa et al. (2011) who found that on average, a 10% incre”
Tourism and Economic Development: Evidence from Mexico’s Coastline (2019, methodology): “Arezki et al. (2009) regress average country-level growth rates over the period 1980-2002 on a measure of tourism specialization in a cross-section of 127 countries, and use the list of UN World Heritage sites as an instrumental variable for tourism specialization.”
Tourism Specialization, Absorptive Capacity, and Economic Growth (2017, background): “Arezki, Cherif, and Piotrowski (2009) too find a positive relationship between tourism specialization and economic growth.”
Revisiting the Tourism-Led Economic Growth Hypothesis: The Case of China (2018, methodology): “Following Arezki, Cherif, and Piotrowski (2009) and Chang, Khamkaew, and McAleer (2012), we used the annual number of developed scenic spots per surface area (square kilometers), denoted as ATTR, as the instrumental variable for TS to correct the potential endogeneity, as it affects GY only through…”