Tourism and CO2 emissions nexus in Southeast Asia: new evidence from panel estimation

The past decade has seen the rapid development of the tourist industry in Southeast Asia. There is increasing concern that tourism is highly affecting CO2 emissions, but the nature of the relationship is still unclear. The main target of this paper is to investigate the existence of a linear and/or nonlinear relationship between tourism and CO2 emissions in the five most important countries located in Southeast Asia, using the panel cointegration and pooled mean group techniques. The results indicate that tourism and CO2 emissions are cointegrated, implying that tourism affects CO2 emissions in the long run. Our findings support the nonlinear relationship between tourism and emissions as well as economic activities and CO2 emissions. Accordingly, an inverted U-shaped relationship exists between tourism and emissions confirming the existence of an Environmental Kuznets Curve in the Southeast Asian tourism industry. Furthermore, the empirical results show that economic activities and energy consumption greatly increase emissions.