Assessing the asymmetric influence of ICT on the tourism development: fresh insights from a tourist destination economy

The United Nations' 'Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)' recommended seventeen viable strategies aimed at eradicating poverty, maintaining the quality of the natural environment, and assuring everyone's prosperity. Travel and tourism are the primary stream segments by which all three of the above-mentioned United Nations agendas may be effectively addressed. However, India's long-term vision is also in accordance with the SDGs, which place considerable attention on tourism expansion, invention, and sustainable development through the 'information and communication technology (ICT)' renaissance. In this milieu, considering annual data from 1990 to 2017, this research aims to examine the asymmetric linkage between tourism (no. of tourist arrivals), ICT (ratio of the population using the internet), and economic growth in India. We employed the 'non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL)' bounds approach to explore the asymmetric cointegration among the drivers under investigation and confirmed long-run cointegration. Results from NARDL elicited that a positive shock in the partial sum of ICT dwindles tourist arrivals, whereas a negative shock to the ICT fosters tourist visits in the long run. Furthermore, it seems that the expansion of the Indian tourist industry is positively correlated with economic growth. The single Fourier Frequency Granger causality test revealed ICT and Tourist Arrivals (TA), and GDP and TA have a feedback loop.