DO INTERNATIONAL TRADE, OFFICIAL IMMIGRATION, AND INTERNATIONAL TOURISM CONTRIBUTE TO US REAL GDP GROWTH? A TIME SERIES ANALYSIS

This paper re-investigates the individual and interactive effects of international trade, international tourism, and official inbound migration on US real GDP growth. This paper deploys annual data without trend from 1980 through 2019, prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic period, and applied Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing procedure for co-integration. On the clear evidence of a co-integrating relationship among these variables, a vector error-correction model (VECM) is estimated. Based on efficient DF-GLS (Dickey–Fuller Generalized) and Ng-Perron tests, variables depict a mixture of I(0) and I(1) behaviors. ARDL bounds testing confirms a co-integrating relationship among the variables. The VECM estimates reveal complete convergence toward long-run equilibrium in about 2.3 years. Positive short-run interactive feedback effects among the variables depict mutual reinforcement to contribute to US real GDP growth.