Impact of growth in international tourism industry contributed to CO2 emission in Cambodia, Philippines and Thailand

Abstract

Tourism is generally considered a clean industry, one of the reasons is tourism increasing investment in traveling facilities, instead of investment in factories. Furthermore, increasing tourism development relies on the protection of the natural environment and ecology. However, tourism development, like all industrial development, also comes with the higher demand in energy consumption and lack of management in the tourism industry resulting in environmental degradation

The paper investigated the effect of environmental degradation in both aspects of destination factors and tourist factors based on the EKC hypothesis by incorporating trade openness and CO2 emission in Cambodia, Philippines, and Thailand which are the top three countries in South East Asia with the highest proportion of income from tourism to the entire economy.