Abstract
Tourism industry has become one of the principal sources of economic growth and a viable platform of employment both in Africa and globally. Considering that economic growth and job creation are the focal points of sustainable development goals (SDGs), this study is focused on investigating the relationship they have with tourism in Nigeria. A gross domestic product (GDP) time series dataset is utilized to represent economic growth variable while, statistical data obtained from the WTTC is employed to denote Tourism revenues and arrivals in Nigeria. The study employed Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds test of cointegration, the Error Correction model and Granger causality tests to empirically examine the impacts tourism has on economic growth and employment in the LACKET states of Nigeria for the period between 1999 to 2019. Generally, the investigations indicate that both in the short - and long - run, tourism is positively related to economic growth and employment rate in Nigeria. However, regarding short -run relationship, a lower positive link of tourism revenue is recorded.
Highlights
Tourism sector has become a very important industry in realizing sustainable development goals (SDGs) in many least developed countries (LDC)
Once we establish the integration, we utilize the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing technique to estimate the level of impact tourism has on economic growth in Nigeria
For the conditional ARDL-Unrestricted Error Correction Model (UECM), we selected the appropriate lag length based on the Schwarz Bayesian Criterion (SBC)
Summary
Tourism sector has become a very important industry in realizing sustainable development goals (SDGs) in many least developed countries (LDC). According to the report of OECD (2019), the tourism sector contributes about 4.5 percent directly to the gross domestic product (GDP) and about 7.1% to employment which are the key targets of SDGs in most developing and developed member countries. To be precise, according to the study of Tugcu (2014), in 2014, 6% of the overall global exports of products and service which represents 30 per cent of international trade in services was accounted for by the tourism industry. The study shows that tourism industry yields about 9.8% of the total global gross domestic product (GDP). Due to the growing size of the tourist industry, inbound tourism has become an increasing and significant influencer of several LDCs
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