Thanh Huu Phu Nguyen, Hoang Phong Le
Within the last three decades, tourism industry has been growing exponentially with significant effects on economic growth, social distribution alongside environmental consequences. Despite the extensive body of literature, knowledge gaps persist in how tourism affects global sustainable development in a comprehensive fashion. This study examines the impact of international tourism on sustainable development through a multidimensional framework incorporating economic growth, natural resource use, and sustainable development in a global context. The analysis for cross-sectional dependence, heterogeneous coefficients, structural break, and cointegration confirm their coexistence, necessitating the use of advanced estimators. The findings, which are robust across multiple sensitivity analyses, reveal that international tourism positively contributes to long-run economic growth and sustainable development, while it is negatively associated with long-run natural resource use. Additional quantile-based evidence further highlights that the growth-enhancing effect of international tourism is stronger in highly developed economies, the alleviating impact on natural resource use is more pronounced in countries with high material pressures, and the sustainability-enhancing role of tourism diminishes in economies positioned at the highest levels of sustainable development. The findings offer several policy implications on how tourism can be leveraged as a catalyst for long-term sustainable, inclusive, and resource-efficient growth.