Tourism and environmental performance: New evidence using a threshold regression analysis

Abstract

To verify whether the effect of tourism on environmental performance differs by the level of tourism development, a panel threshold regression approach is applied to observe the effects of tourism on environmental performance in 97 countries over the 2002–2012 periods. Our results suggest that tourism always has a significant negative influence on the environmental performance, implying that tourism will unavoidably result in environmental degradation, irrespective of how high the level of tourism development. However, when tourism development exceeds a certain value, tourism will relatively have less influence on environmental performance. In terms of policy implications, given that tourism wills inevitably worse environmental quality, the policymakers should consider the optimal level of tourism development at around the estimated threshold level to minimize the negative impact of tourism on the environment.