The dynamic linkages among outbound tourism, economic growth, and international trade: empirical evidence from China

The aim of this research was to examine the long- and short-run relationships among real expenditures on outbound tourism from China, economic growth and international trade for the period of 1995 to 2018, applying a newly developed cointegration test—the Bootstrap Autoregressive Distributed Lag framework. Evidence of cointegration was found when expenditures on outbound tourism served as the dependent variable, and economic growth and international trade were important factors affecting outbound tourism from China. For the short-run, a two-way Granger causality relationship was detected between economic growth and outbound tourism expenditures, and the feedback was confirmed between outbound tourism expenditures and international trade. The findings have important policy implications for the growth of the outbound tourism market. Large volumes of outbound tourists result in economic losses for China and outbound tourism reduces the growth of tourism-driven international trade.