Tourism and air quality: an econometric study for European countrie

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Sara Isabel Rodrigues
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/27493
• topic: Tourism; Air Quality; Environment; PM10; Vector Autoregressive Model (VAR); Granger Causality; European Countries

The strong growth of the tourism sector in some European countries, in the last years, has changed the way citizens and politicians look at this sector, as regards its environmental impact and the consequences it may have on the air quality of destinations, in particular. Recently, tourism started to be analyzed together with the variables related with air quality and the true impact of these concepts on each other started to be analyzed, since tourism on the one hand can affect the environment, and on the other it is also heavily dependent on it for development and growth. This study fetches to understand the impact of air quality in the moment of choosing a tourism destination or, the impact that tourism may have on the air quality of a specific place. The indicators used were the nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments, as representative of tourism demand, and the PM10 concentration levels as representative of air quality. This data was worked on a Multivariate Framework and using a Vector Autoregressive Model (VAR), focusing on European countries (Austria, Cyprus, UK, Italy and Switzerland) for monthly figures that cover the period from January 2008 to January 2015. The results show that for Austria and Italy tourism growth can deteriorate air quality. On the other hand, a poorer air quality of the destination may decrease the tourist demand, as evidenced for Cyprus and Great Britain. Overall, causality results show that tourism causes PM10 levels, and variance decomposition results show that shocks in PM10 levels explain a large percentage of the error variation in tourist demand. The main results are useful, in particularly for environmental policy making over tourism. Authorities should provide effective measures to improve air quality, for instance through the establishment of early warning mechanisms to monitor air pollution in certain touristic regions and taking effective measures to recover the potential damage on destination’s brand and image. Moreover, authorities should analyze which tourism activities or tourist behavior can be damaging the environment, in particular air quality, and adopt corrective policies that minimize these impacts.