Is the tourism-led growth hypothesis valid for Turkey?

Like many developing countries, Turkey has also given priority to the development of tourism industry as a part of its economic growth strategy. This study intends to investigate whether tourism has really contributed to the economic growth in Turkey. The interaction between tourism and economic growth is investigated by making use of leveraged bootstrap causality tests. This method is robust to the existence of non-normality and ARCH effects. Special attention is given to the choice of the optimal lag order of the empirical model. It is found that the tourism-led growth hypothesis is supported empirically in the case of Turkey.