Resource Efficiency and Eco‐Tourism Performance in Asia: A Cross‐Country Panel Analysis

ABSTRACT The resource‐efficiency coefficient is not statistically significant in our full‐sample model of tourism receipts. The other estimates show why the outcome measure and the treatment of the pandemic period matter to its interpretation. We examine this relationship in a static panel of 14 Asian economies from 2002 to 2022. Inclusion in the sample is determined by data availability in the current World Bank extract. Resource efficiency is the primary explanatory variable, measured as GDP produced per unit of CO 2 ‐equivalent emitted. The Fixed Effects baseline uses country‐clustered standard errors and controls for population, electricity consumption, internet access, and urbanisation. Receipts as a share of exports yield a positive, statistically significant association with resource efficiency ( β = 1.318, p < 0.001); visitor arrivals do not yield a significant association ( β = 0.346, p = 0.608). Isolating or controlling for the COVID‐19 period strengthens the receipts result, with marginal significance in the pre‐COVID specification ( β = 0.753, p = 0.055). Taken together, these results favour evaluating resource‐efficiency policy in tourism‐dependent Asian economies in terms of the economic value generated by tourism, while retaining the conditions under which the association does and does not hold.