Resumo

The increase of the globalization phenomenon at the end of the XX century was vital for the tourism industry, since more information, combined with easier ways of movement, instigated the decision to travel. In this study, through a Panel Var composed of 26 countries of Latin American (LA) and the Caribbean, it was verified a relationship between the decomposition of the KOF index (social, economic and political), the GDP and the GDP generated by tourism.

Some economies depend directly on tourism, in 2016 travel and tourism contributed more than 50% of GDP to the top four countries on the World Travel and Tourism Council list (WTTC, 2016). It is common to find authorities guiding their economies to obtain more tourism revenue (Aydin, 2016). Therefore, the general objective of this study is, through current historical data, to revisit the Latin American and Caribbean scenario to establish an empirical model and to point out the causal relations between macroeconomic variables.

Researchers do not cease their quest to understand the effects of tourism on the economy (Croes et al., 2018; Chulaphan & Barahona, 2017), this theme continues to be relevant and studied. There are four hypotheses about the relation between economic growth and tourism: (i) growth; (ii) conservation; (iii) feedback; and (iv) neutrality. Recent data from the World Travel and Tourism Council (2016) allow a new empirical analysis of the behavior of tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Love & Zicchino (2006) developed the methodology PVAR used in this article. This technique combines the traditional VAR approach, which treats all variables in the system as endogenous, with the panel-data approach that allows unobserved individual heterogeneity (Grossmann et al., 2014). The PVAR estimation is commonly found in the economic literature (Brana et al. 2012; Neves et al., 2018; Jawadi et al., 2016; Koengkan et al., 2017; Lin & Zhu, 2017).

Results reaffirming that the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean need to further develop the creation of connections to increase the gains from tourism. It is up to the public agents to establish measures and regulations to facilitate the access and increase the publicity of the destinations internationally.

Our results show a causal relation between tourism GDP and public investment. This relation is a unidirectional-one in the sense that tourism GDP causes public investment. Reinforcing that the Latin American and Caribbean countries also depend on the wealth of this sector to develop in economic, social and political aspects. Another result obtained in this study where the GDP without the contribution of the tourism sector has a bidirectional relation with the public investment, that is, the public investment that possibly will return to generate wealth.

BALAGUER, J.; CANTAVELLA-JORDÀ, M. (2002): Tourism as a long-run economic growth factor: The Spanish case. Applied Economics, 34, 877-884. LOVE, I., & ZICCHINO, L. (2006). Financial development and dynamic investment behaviour: evidence from panel VAR. The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 46(2), 190-210.