Impact of environmental factors on tourism industry in Pakistan: A study from the last three decades

Abstract

From the context of Pakistan, current study works on the key purpose to evaluate the various environmental factors and their impacts on the local tourism sector in Pakistan. For this aim there are three major dimensions of the overall environment; economic and financial indicators, social development and macroclimate changes have been selected with their key indicators based on the data sets from world development indicator (WDI). Separate standardized regression equations for each of the three factors are developed by focusing on significant statistical tests and techniques. The findings of the study reveal the fact that economic and financial indicators have a significant influence on tourism earnings, while social development and macroclimate indicators have both positive and adverse impact on the tourism industry in Pakistan. All the models are statistically significant and have provided strong evidence for the key managers to develop strategic planning for tourism industry after consideration of stated factors of the study. Additionally, this study explores the association between the key environmental factors and tourism sector in such context in a very first time. However, findings are limited to the contextual framework of Pakistan only and cannot be generalized to other economies. Finally, by adding more factors from the local environment like terrorism, the cogent for the future studies can be boosted.