Green procurement and financial performance in the tourism industry: the moderating role of tourists’ green purchasing behaviour

This article analyses the effect of green procurement – the adoption of specific purchasing environmental policies along the supply chain – on firm’s financial performance and the influence of tourists’ green purchasing behaviour – measured in terms of long-term orientation, green perceived risk and cost-green quality inference – on this relationship. Past literature has scarcely considered the role of tourists’ green purchasing behaviours as key factors that influence the performance implications of the adoption of environmental practices. Our sample focuses on the tourism industry and includes data on 122 firms over a seven-year period creating an unbalanced panel with 479 observations. We apply random-effects generalized least squares regressions to test the proposed relationships. We do not find a positive relationship between green procurement and financial performance. We find that the positive relationship only holds when the moderating effects of tourists’ green purchasing behaviour are added. By using panel data, this research contributes to the literature on sustainable tourism because it offers an insight on the nature of the relationship between environmental practices and financial performance over a long period of time. Moreover, it highlights under which conditions tourists enable firms to accrue financial benefits from the adoption of environmental practices.