Abstract
Travel and tourism have glimpsed a significant and promising implication for economic development. Despite the commendatory implication of tourism, it levies a stringent environmental cost such as environmental degeneration. Hence, this study will incorporate the 18 countries out of the top 20 travel and tourism contributors to economic growth to assess the progressive correlation between tourist arrival, economic growth, energy consumption, and oil consumption on carbon emission by applying panel ARDL spanning from 1995 to 2019. The outcome of the panel ARDL reveals that both periods have witnessed that the endogenous variables have a substantial and positive impact on environmental degradation except for tourism as it indicates -0.22 and -0.48% in the long and short run, having a rate of adjustment as -0.52 toward the equilibrium. The simultaneous quantile regression reveals that in the 50 and 75 percentiles, the effect of tourism has a negative impact, which contradicts the PMG findings. These determinations suggest that the policymakers look for more manageable and environmentally sound tourism and economic growth procedures to safeguard the sustainable environment in the studied countries.