A Comparative Study of the Economic Impact of Tourism on the West African Economies

The tourism sector is an imperative source of economic growth which is a composition of both income per capita, GDP per capita, foreign exchange earnings, and employment. These factors are assumed to contribute to economic development of the west African subregion. This research is focused on investigating the comparative impact tourism industry has on economic growth and the contrariwise. In order to realize this goal, we estimated a dynamic panel using the estimator of the systems generalized method of moment’s (GMM) coupled with pooled ordinary least squares (POLS) which are applied to about eight economically viable west African countries for the period 1999 – 2019. This research is an addition to the incomplete empirical studies on the effect tourism has on economic growth and the contrariwise between west African countries. Also, this research contributes by building on preceding researches by presenting a primal possible factor of economic growth, such as the observation of corruption, and by utilizing significant quadratic and collaborating effects. The results show that an increase tourism performance results in a maximum level of economic growth and the west African countries with a high supposed level of corruption have a minimal level of economic growth. By utilizing the economic growth model, we also observed a substantial positive influence of the tourism industry on economic growth of the west African countries. Likewise, the results of econometric analysis for the tourists` arrival model show that economic growth is very important for the progression of the tourism industry. Hence, west African countries are encouraged to establish a very favorable environment (for instance, political stability) and invest their capitals to upsurge the influence of the tourism industry to national income and overall economic growth rate. Keywords: Tourism, west-Africa, Tourists Arrival, Domestic tourism, Panel data, Economic growth. DOI: 10.7176/JTHS/56-01 Publication date:May 31st 2021