Abstract
Tourism development has been considered as a strategy to reduce the level of poverty in many developing countries. However, only few studies have analyzed the relationship between tourism growth and poverty alleviation. Therefore, this paper attempts to analyze the tourism-poverty nexus by using the data of 66 countries from 1995 to 2012. Tourism growth is used as an economic indicator to analyze the poverty-tourism nexus correlation. The estimated results suggest that 1) tourism has a significant effect on poverty reduction. 2) The poverty reduction effect of tourism decreases with an increase level of country’s tourism specialization. Thus, in order to achieve the goal of pro-poor tourism, tourism specialization level should be considered. Specifically, tourism sector should cooperate with other industries and develop appropriately.
