Tourism Resource Development and Long-Term Economic Growth: A Resource Curse Hypothesis Approach

Taotao Deng, Mulan Ma and Jianhua Cao
Additional contact information
Taotao Deng: School of Urban and Regional Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, No 777 Guoding Road, Shanghai 200433, China
Mulan Ma: School of Tourism and Event Management, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, No 1900 Wenxiang Road, Shanghai, 201620, China
Jianhua Cao: School of Urban and Regional Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, No 777 Guoding Road, Shanghai 200433, China

Tourism Economics, 2014, vol. 20, issue 5, 923-938

Abstract: The paper proposes a resource curse hypothesis approach to analyse the instability of tourism-led growth. Using panel data on China's 30 provinces over the period 1987–2010, this study examines the direct and indirect effects of tourism on long-term economic growth. Four transmission channels widely held in the resource curse hypothesis are applied in the tourism industry: Dutch disease effect, crowding-out effect, deterioration of institutional quality and volatility of resource trade. The empirical results show that even in the non-tourism-dependent economies there is a possibility that the tourism resource curse will occur in the long term. Tourism resource development tends to reduce economic growth, mainly through crowding out human capital. A tourism boom seems to have a crowding-out effect on industrial production; however, the effect is small and insignificant in the large non-tourism-dependent economies. The physical investment channel is identified as the most important positive transmission channel through which tourism activity exerts more influence on growth.

Keywords: resource curse hypothesis; tourism-led growth hypothesis; tourism resource; economic growth; Dutch disease effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5367/te.2013.0325 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:toueco:v:20:y:2014:i:5:p:923-938

DOI: 10.5367/te.2013.0325

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Tourism Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().