Towards Efforts to Equalize Income in Africa: The Role of Tourism Development

Abstract

A vast literature has investigated the nexus between tourism and income inequality in developing and developed countries. Unfortunately, the literature on the impact of tourism on income inequality in Africa is sparse. Hence, this study examines the influence of tourism on income inequality in 30 African countries over the period 1996–2020. In addition to international tourism arrivals and international tourism receipts which have been widely used by previous studies, this study uses a plethora of tourism indicators, namely business tourism spending, leisure tourism spending, internal travel and tourism consumption, domestic tourism spending, and visitor exports. Moreover, unlike previous studies that have extensively used the Gini index with its inadequacy as a measurement of income inequality; this study uses the Atkinson index and Palma ratio to capture extreme points of the inequality distribution. The empirical evidence is based on the panel-corrected standard error (PCSE) estimation technique. The results reveal that tourism contributes to the equalization of income in Africa, contingent on the type of tourism. Policy implications are discussed.