Abstract
The tourism sector is an imperative source of economic growth which is a composition of both income per capita, GDP per capita, foreign exchange earnings, and employment. These factors are assumed to contribute to economic development of the west African subregion. This research is focused on investigating the comparative impact tourism industry has on economic growth and the contrariwise. In order to realize this goal, we estimated a dynamic panel using the estimator of the systems generalized method of moment’s (GMM) coupled with pooled ordinary least squares (POLS) which are applied to about eight economically viable west African countries for the period 1999 – 2019. This research is an addition to the incomplete empirical studies on the effect tourism has on economic growth and the contrariwise between west African countries. Also, this research contributes by building on preceding researches by presenting a primal possible factor of economic growth, such as the observation of corruption, and by utilizing significant quadratic and collaborating effects. The results show that an increase tourism performance results in a maximum level of economic growth and the west African countries with a high supposed level of corruption have a minimal level of economic growth. By utilizing the economic growth model, we also observed a substantial positive influence of the tourism industry on economic growth of the west African countries. Likewise, the results of econometric analysis for the tourists` arrival model show that economic growth is very important for the progression of the tourism industry. Hence, west African countries are encouraged to establish a very favorable environment (for instance, political stability) and invest their capitals to upsurge the influence of the tourism industry to national income and overall economic growth rate. Keywords: Tourism, west-Africa, Tourists Arrival, Domestic tourism, Panel data, Economic growth. DOI: 10.7176/JTHS/56-01 Publication date: May 31 st 2021
Highlights
Tourism has over time, been among the quickest growing sectors and the world’s largest industry, it accounts for more than one-third of the total value of global services trade (UNWTO 2006b)
The gross domestic product (GDP) is the most used macro-economic indicator for measuring output and it is estimated in terms of www.iiste.org per capita and logarithm
5 Conclusion and Policy recommendations 5.1 Conclusion Tourism can serve as source of foreign exchange earnings, income and employment
Summary
Been among the quickest growing sectors and the world’s largest industry, it accounts for more than one-third of the total value of global services trade (UNWTO 2006b). An alternative system of export referred to as Tourist spending, is believed to add value to the balance of payments by earnings from foreign exchange as well as proceeds from tourism expansion. This can represent a substantial income source for a country’s economy (Balaguer and Cantavella-Jordá 2002). Foreign exchange incomes from tourism can afterward be utilize in the importation of capital goods so as to produce new goods and services, leading to growth in the economic (McKinnon 1964)
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