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College of Business & Finance

Journal of Business and Socio-economic Development

Tourism and income inequality

License

Published in Journal of Business and Socio-economic Development. Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

Abstract

Purpose

Tourism has grown to be one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economic industries. Tourism development is viewed as a tool to improve income distribution as it allows people at the bottom of the pyramid to get involved in the industry. This study aims to examine the impact of tourism on income inequality in the top income equality countries.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper employs fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squares techniques to investigate the dynamic impact of tourism on income inequality in the world’s most income equality countries, from 2001 to 2016.

Findings

The result shows that tourism is one of the major drivers of income equality. Thus, tourism can be used to reduce a country’s income disparity.

Practical implications

As a result, policymakers should support the tourism industry to reduce income disparity and enhance income distribution.

Originality/value

Given the conflicting findings in the literature, this study reexamines this link and attempts to backwardly assess if the top equal-income countries in the world are heavily dependent on tourism.

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