Women's empowerment and tourism: Emerging determinants of poverty in low and middle‐income countries

Abstract

This study examines the impact of women's empowerment and tourism on poverty in the developing economies of South Asia, sub‐Saharan Africa and Latin America. Current study formulates a vector autoregression (VAR) model to estimate the long‐run association between emerging determinants of poverty reduction. Our empirical findings show that tourism and women's empowerment have significant and negative long‐term associations with poverty in South Asia, Latin America and Africa. Moreover, this study found that women's empowerment is relatively more important in poverty reduction than tourism in South Asia and Africa, whereas in Latin America, tourism has a relatively greater contribution to poverty. Similarly, the results of the vector error‐correction (VECM) Granger Causality/Block Exogeneity Wald test indicated unidirectional causality between women's empowerment and poverty, tourism and poverty in South Asia. Similarly, unidirectional causality exists between women's empowerment and poverty in Latin America and Africa. Our econometric discussion helps suggest policy suggestions to overcome the challenges of poverty in developing economies.