TOURISM AND ECONOMIC GROWTH THROUGH PANEL DATA COINTEGRATION FOR LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES

This paper establishes the relationships be-tween economic growth and tourism devel-opment in five Latin American countries: Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. The objective is to obtain em-pirical evidence that allows establishing the relationship between economic growth and tourism development through a multi-variate model that uses real income from tourism per capita, the number of international tourist arrivals per capita, the real effec-tive exchange rate (that is, a proxy variable for external competitiveness) and real GDP per capita using the cointegration technique of heterogeneous panel data. In this way, it was decided to carry out cointegration tests and econometric techniques using fully modi-fied ordinary least squares, through the use of panel data, using annual data between the periods 2000-2019 for the writing. As main results, solid evidence is established in panel cointegration relationships between tourism development and GDP for the case of the 5 Latin American countries considered in the study, in the same way the existence of the relationship between tourism income and GDP of the countries analyzed.