Does Tourism Promote Human Development in Vietnam? Evidence from Time Series Analysis

Abstract

This research’s goal is to examine the relationship between tourism growth and human development in Vietnam and the possible mechanisms behind it. An annual series of data from 1993 to 2020 was collected. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach was used to explore the cointegration relationship between the variables. The Toda – Yamamoto Granger non-causality test was used to explore the causal nexus between tourism and human development. The empirical results from the cointegration test suggested that in the long run, the tourism sector and human development have a positive and significant relationship and that government expenditure has a negative impact on human development in Vietnam. Also, the causality outcomes suggested there is a bilateral linkage between tourism and human development. As one of the first papers to examine the impact of tourism on human development in Vietnam, this study can provide policy-makers and other decision-makers with meaningful implications for the evaluation and improvement of people’s lives and well-being, given the increasing role of tourism in the socio-economic context of Vietnam.