THE IMPACT OF TOURISM DEVELOPMENT ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA

This study examined the impact of tourism development on sustainable development in Nigeria from 1990 to 2025 using annual time-series data and the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation technique. Sustainable development was proxied by the Human Development Index (HDI), while tourism development, gross capital formation, inflation, trade openness, carbon dioxide emissions, and institutional quality were included as explanatory variables. The findings revealed that tourism development, gross capital formation, inflation, and trade openness significantly influenced sustainable development, whereas carbon dioxide emissions and institutional quality were statistically insignificant. Specifically, tourism development, gross capital formation, and trade openness exerted significant negative effects on HDI, contrary to their positive a-priori expectations, suggesting that inadequate infrastructure, inefficient investment allocation, weak domestic productive capacity, and limited transmission of economic gains constrained their developmental contributions. Conversely, inflation exerted a significant negative effect, consistent with its expected adverse influence on human development, whereas carbon dioxide emissions recorded the expected negative but statistically insignificant effect and institutional quality exhibited a positive but statistically insignificant effect. Furthermore, the Granger causality results revealed unidirectional predictive causality from HDI to carbon dioxide emissions and from institutional quality to HDI, while carbon dioxide emissions and gross capital formation exhibited bidirectional predictive causality. The study concluded that tourism development had not generated the expected sustainable-development gains in Nigeria and recommended improved tourism infrastructure, greater local participation, productive investment, export diversification, price stability, and stronger institutional and environmental governance to promote sustainable human development.