Impact of tourism on poverty reduction: Evidence from an emerging tourism market

Abstract

There are few studies focusing on the effect of tourism on poverty in the emerging tourism markets, however, there is no empirical evidence in Vietnam. Our paper is the first one that aims to investigate the impact of tourism on poverty with a new database collected from 61 provinces in Vietnam over the period 2010–2018. The empirical result strongly shows that tourism has a negative and significant impact on poverty in all estimated models. It means that a higher in tourism revenue can lead to a lower poverty rate in the provinces. Besides, labour force and education are found to have a negative and significant effect on poverty. Although foreign direct investment has a negative impact on poverty, however, the coeffi-cients are not significant. Finally, we have some conclusions and implications for policymakers to sustainably reduce the poverty rate of households in the future.