Impact of tourist arrivals on environmental quality: a way towards environmental sustainability targets

This paper examines the impact of tourist arrivals on environmental degradation, as well as highlights the implications of this interaction on environmental sustainability targets, while controlling for globalization, energy consumption and economic growth. The study adds to the existing literature by employing the quantile-on-quantile regression (QQR) to examine the nonlinear relationship between carbon emissions and the regressors over the period 1995-2018, using quarterly data. As a robustness check, the conventional quantile regression (QR) model is also applied to capture the nexus across quantiles (0.1-0.9). Furthermore, quantile causality is utilized to capture the causal interrelationships between CO2 and the regressors across quantiles (0.1-0.90). Overall, results show that globalization, tourist arrivals, economic growth and energy consumption increase environmental degradation at different quantiles. The quantile causality results also reveal evidence of causality in mean and variance from globalization, tourist arrivals, economic growth and energy consumption to CO2 emissions in majority of the quantiles. From a policy standpoint, it is recommended that policymakers in Thailand should come up with sound and effective environmental policies that would help the economy achieve sustainable environmental quality for both the immediate and future generations.