Does financial inclusion promote tourism development in advanced and emerging economies?

Abstract

This research paper is the first of its kind to consider the financial inclusion, which is constructed using the depth, access and efficiency of the financial institutions and markets, and various aspects of tourism development such as business tourism spending, direct tourism contribution, domestic tourism spending, total internal tourism expenses, leisure tourism spending and total tourism contribution. Given the growing importance of financial inclusion in the recent time, this paper is designed to investigate the role of financial inclusion on various dimensions of tourism development across the panels of 24 advanced and 21 emerging economies around the world, using yearly data from 1995 to 2016. Given the presence of cross-sectional dependence in the data series, we employ Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator as it is a robust technique to handle this issue in the estimation.The evidences show that financial inclusion has a significant positive impact on various aspects of tourism development across the panels. The results also suggest that the impact is more in emerging economies than that of advanced economies. Hence, this paper offers numerous policy and practical suggestions for sustainable tourism management.

Nexus between environmental sustainability, good governance, financial inclusion, and tourism development in Bangladesh: Evidence from symmetric and asymmetric investigation

“…Study findings advocate that easy access to financial services offers efficiency in a financial settlement, especially in the case of currency conversion and electronic money transfer in rendering tourism services. The study findings are supported by the literature such as (Shi et al, 2020;Gopalan and Khalid, 2022;Xia et al, 2022). Innovation and financial inclusion are closely intertwined.…”

“…Financial and social inclusion are impacted by tourism (Kumar et al, 2020). Shi et al, (2020) claim that low-income families benefit greatly from gender-sensitive financial inclusion. Similarly, the economic prosperity of low-income families in the regions around tourist locations benefits greatly from a tourism business that considers gender.…”

“…However, very few works of literature concentrate on the opposing notion that it is essential to ensure financial inclusion to boost tourism. Financial inclusion's effect on tourist growth was studied (Shi et al, 2020) using data from 1995-2016 from 24 developed and 21 developing countries. The findings, which feature policy recommendations and useful ideas, demonstrate that financial inclusion has a major effect on various facets of tourism growth.…”

Does the size of the tourism sector influence the economic policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic?

“…These variables have been used in the literature as a proxy for the size and the level of development of the tourism sector in a destination country (see, e.g. Lee & Chang, 2008;McCartney, 2019;Shafiullah et al, 2019;Shi et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 1997).…”

Governance, tourism and inclusive growth in Africa

“…According to Jackman (2022) and , tourism has the power to boost women's employment and entrepreneurship, which could contribute to the reduction of gender inequality. This fact has been corroborated by Shi et al (2021), who argued that female employment can be promoted by developing the tourism industry. Further, the authors have documented that increasing female jobs is important to reduce poverty, promote sustaining economic growth and enhance women empowerment.…”