Climate Change, Growth Determinants and Tourism Industry: Time Series Analysis from Malaysia

The purpose of this study is to examine the factor of climate change and its influence on tourism in Malaysia. For climate change, key indicators are level of temperature, renewable energy consumption, rain fall, disaster risk reduction score, and droughts, flood, and extreme temperature as percentage of overall population. In addition, population growth rate and GDP per capita growth rate are also added in the models. For tourism industry two indicators under the title of tourism expenditure and international tourism receipt are examined. Time duration of the study consist of 1970 to 2017 with annual observations. Descriptive, correlation and regression analyses techniques are applied to examine the effect of growth factors and climate change on tourism industry. It is found that factors like temperature level, rain fall are playing their significant determinants of tourism dimensions. These findings are providing a significant guideline to various policy makers, country officials and those who are responsible to deal with increase issues of climate change in Malaysia. Additionally, theoretical and practical significance of the study can be viewed in a way that it has added reasonable empirical contribution in existing literature. However, study is limited towards the consideration of specific indicators under the title of climate change. Future research can be conducted while adding more factors of climate change in targeted regions.