Tourist arrivals and macroeconomic determinants of CO2 emissions in Malaysia

This paper investigates the determinants of carbon dioxide emission with special emphasis on tourism development in Malaysia. Within a multivariate framework, which includes real GDP, energy consumption, financial development, and urbanization, cointegration and causality tests were applied to determine the relationship in the variables. The results reveal long-run relationships between the series and a positive unidirectional long-run causality running from tourist arrivals and the other series to pollution. The study fails to establish any causal relationship between tourism and economic growth in the long-run. These findings suggest that tourist arrivals are active contributors to pollution, but arrivals do not translate into sufficient upsurge in GDP. It is recommended that policy-makers should entrench cleaner energy programmes in their tourism development policies.