Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Management Sciences, IQRA University, Karachi, 75300, Pakistan. syed_aliraza@hotmail.com
  • 2 Faculty of Business Administration and Social Sciences, Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Karachi, Pakistan
  • 3 Department of Management Sciences, IQRA University, Karachi, 75300, Pakistan
  • 4 Department of Computer Science, Capital University of Science and Technology (CUST), Islamabad, Pakistan
  • 5 School of Quantitative Sciences, UUM College of Arts and Sciences, Universiti Utara Malaysia, UUM, 06010, Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia
  • 6 Department of Economics & Management Sciences, NED University of Engineering & Technology, Karachi, Pakistan
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int, 2021 Jan;28(2):1426-1442.
PMID: 32840747 DOI: 10.1007/s11356-020-10179-3

Abstract

The study aims to analyze two objectives: first is to explore the non-linear relationship between tourism development, economic growth, urbanization, and environmental degradation, and also to analyze the threshold level of the contribution of tourism development on environmental degradation in top tourist arrival destinations. We applied the newly proposed econometric method panel smooth transition regression (PSTR) framework with two regimes on yearly panel data from 1995 to 2017. Findings suggest that the relationship between tourism development and environmental degradation is non-linear and regime dependent. Furthermore, the findings indicated that the relationship above the threshold level is negative and significant, while below the threshold, tourism development is positive and significant effect on environmental degradation. Tourism development and environmental degradation also exhibit the inverted U-shape relationship meaning that at a particular point, increase in tourism development increases in environmental degradation but after a particular point, increase in tourism development decreases the environmental degradation. The economic growth and urbanization also portray a non-linear and regime-dependent relationship with environmental degradation. The study assists policies and empirical information.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.