The impact of tourism on economic growth in developing countries: Two approaches static panel data and dynamic panel data

Tourism is the largest service industry in the world in terms of income generation. This industry leads to Environmental، cultural، social، political، economic impacts. Development of tourism is very important for developing countries which are faced with problems such as high unemployment، limited financial resources and the economy single- product. Therefore، the aim of this paper is that we seek to answer the question «whether the tourism sector in developing countries contribute to the economic growth of these nations or not.» In this paper، is estimated the relationship between tourism and economic growth، for 68 developing countries (including Asia، Africa and Latin America countries) in period of time period 1999-2011 using fixed effects estimators and approach of System Generalized Method of Moments (System- GMM) by stata11. Factors that led to using of the System- GMM are endogenous variables، a lag of the dependent variable and also autocorrelation between the error terms. The results of this research shown that in selected countries، there is an positive relationship between the tourism and economic growth.