Does air pollution affect the tourism industry in the USA? Evidence from the quantile autoregressive distributed lagged approach

Abstract

This study scrutinised the influence of air pollution on the USA’s tourism industry along with macroeconomic variables from 1990 to 2020. The analyses were conducted using a novel quantile autoregressive distributed lagged (QARDL) technique to examine the nonlinear association in the long and short run. Additionally, the constancy of the parameters under the short- and long-run estimations was investigated using the Wald test. The QARDL results under different quantiles confirmed that air pollution in terms of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and particulate matter (PM2.5) had a negative association with the arrival of international tourists in the USA. However, the long-run estimation for the nonlinear association between gross domestic product (GDP) and tourists' arrival (TA) and between the real effective exchange rate (REER) and TA was positively significant under different quantiles. Alternatively, the estimation of the short run corroborated that the past and lagged values of TA showed a positive correlation with the current and lagged values of international TA. Moreover, the findings of the study confirmed, through Granger causality, the bidirectional causality between tourism, GDP, haze pollution such as PM2.5 and CO₂ emissions and REER in the USA.