Abstract
Prior research address socio-economic aspects of tourism industry and little attention has been paid to investigate the impact of tourism development on economic growth, and environmental quality. Accordingly, this study examines the impact of tourism development on economic growth, CO2 emissions and environmental quality in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco (Muslim majority countries). An autoregressive distributed lag model is used to analyze data for the period 1980-2014. The study further examines the long and short-term relationship between tourism and economic growth; and tourism and environmental quality. The study reveals that economic growth converges to its long-run equilibrium at an adjusting speed of about 25.7% in Morocco, 5.8% in Egypt, and 2.1% in Tunisia. The findings of the study confirm that tourism growth is linked to environmental quality. The study reveals that tourism has a negative effect on the environment quality in Egypt whereas a positive effect in Tunisia and neutral in Morocco. Using the EKC hypothesis tests, the study concludes the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between CO2 emissions and the level of income for Morocco and Egypt, whereas for Tunisia, this relationship is U-shaped. The study also offers policy implications.