The economic growth impact of tourism in Small Island Developing States—evidence from the Caribbean

Colin Cannonier and Monica Galloway Burke
Additional contact information
Monica Galloway Burke: Western Kentucky University, USA

Tourism Economics, 2019, vol. 25, issue 1, 85-108

Abstract: Tourism’s contribution to economic output in the Caribbean exceeds that in other regions of the world. We use panel data over the period of three decades, focusing exclusively on Caribbean islands, to study the causal link between tourism and economic growth. The results show that tourism has a positive and statistically significant effect on real Gross Domestic Product growth. A 10% increase in tourism spending is found to increase economic growth from 0.3% to 1%, a finding that is consistent with similar studies. A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the overall tourism multiplier is around 0.25 which is smaller than estimates from previous studies. These results have important implications for researchers, industry practitioners, and policymakers.

Keywords: Caribbean economies; economic growth; instrumental variables (IV); international tourism; panel data; system generalized method of moments (GMM); tourism receipts; tourist arrivals (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1354816618792792 (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:25:y:2019:i:1:p:85-108

DOI: 10.1177/1354816618792792

Access Statistics for this article

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