The economic impact of educational tourism development: the role of educational tourism receipts

In many nations, one of the major tourism thrusts is educational tourism development, especially the improvement of educational tourism receipts. The tourism sector is more effective when there is an increase in educational tourism revenues as against a mere increase in educational tourism arrivals. However, the few papers on the economic impact of educational tourism development have largely ignored the impact of educational tourism receipts. The objective of this paper is to investigate the impact of educational tourism development on the economy of Australia. The novelty in this paper is that we have not only considered educational tourism arrivals but also educational tourism receipts. The relationship between educational tourism development economic growth has been examined within an augmented neoclassical growth model, which also recognises capital stock, exports of goods and services and population growth as potential determinants of economic growth. A new dynamic Autoregressive Distributed Lag (DARDL) approach has been adopted to estimate the relationship in the series. The empirical findings indicate that an increase in educational tourism arrivals has a positive impact on economic growth of Australia. Besides, educational tourism receipts growth generates positive economic growth, which agrees with the tourism-led growth hypothesis.