A revised perspective on tourism-economic growth nexus, exploring tourism market diversification

Abstract

In this study for the first time, we examined the effect of tourism market diversification (TMD) on economic growth for 109 countries categorized by income groups. Employing Quantile regression, the results revealed that TMD contributes to the economic growth of low- and lower-middle-income countries only at the lower, and lower-to-intermediate quantiles. In high-income countries, TMD not only has no significant effect on economic growth at lower quantile of GDP, but its effect tends to be negative at higher quantiles. Our findings indicated that TMD strategies work better at lower levels of economic growth than at higher levels of economic growth.