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The impact of climate change on tourism economies of Greece, Spain, and Turkey

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Abstract

As major tourism economies in the Southern Mediterranean, Greece, Spain, and Turkey are particularly vulnerable to climate change. With mounting evidence of climate change, we study if the negative impact of climate change on Greece, Spain, and Turkey is particularly large. Empirically, we use a unique data set that makes temperature measurement more meaningful, and adopt the model in Ng and Zhao (Ecological Economics 70:963–970, 2011) to estimate the economic impacts of climate change on different types of economies. Our main finding is that climate change’s adverse impact on Greece, Spain, and Turkey is larger than its impacts on other types of economies, suggesting that Greece, Spain, and Turkey should engage in strong international cooperation to mitigate the adverse impact of climate change.

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Notes

  1. The Leaders’ Declaration from the annual meeting of the G20 world leaders, in 2013, recognizes "the role of travel and tourism as a vehicle for job creation, economic growth and development” and commits to “work towards developing travel facilitation initiatives in support of job creation, quality work, poverty reduction and global growth.” (See the press release of the World Tourism Organization at http://media.unwto.org/en/press-release/2012-06-20/g20-recognizes-travel-tourism-driver-economic-growth-first-time-and-commits).

  2. See also Koenig and Abegg (1997), Agnew and Viner (2001), Elsasser and Burki (2002), Becken (2005), Scott et al. (2006), Moen and Fredman (2007), Pham et al. (2010), Lambert et al. (2010), and Hopkins (2014).

  3. The G-Econ cell is approximately 100 km by 100 km, which is generally smaller than the size of the major subnational political entities for most large countries (e.g., states in the United States) and approximately the same size as the second level political entities in most countries (e.g., counties in the United States).

  4. As a special case of quantile regression, at the 0.5 quantile (or 50 percentile), the median regression also serves as a robust (to outliers) alternative to the least-squares regression.

  5. Based on Eq. (1), at the initial temperature (T 0i ), the fitted value of log output per capita is: \(\log_{e} (\hat{y}_{0i} ) = \phi d_{i} + \hat{a}_{1} T_{0i} + \hat{a}_{2} T_{01}^{2} + \hat{a}_{3} T_{0i}^{3} + b\log (P_{i} )\)

    Holding other relevant variables (e.g., population) constant, at the new temperature (T 1i ), the fitted value of log output per capita is:

    \(\log_{e} (\hat{y}_{1i} ) = \phi d_{i} + \hat{a}_{1} T_{1i} + \hat{a}_{2} T_{1i}^{2} + \hat{a}_{3} T_{1i}^{3} + b\log (P_{i} )\)

    The change in log output per capita is then:

    \(\log_{e} (\hat{y}_{1i} ) - \log_{e} (\hat{y}_{0i} ) = \log_{e} (\frac{{\hat{y}_{1i} }}{{\hat{y}_{0i} }}) = \hat{a}_{1} (T_{1i} - T_{0i} ) + \hat{a}_{2} (T_{1i}^{2} - T_{0i}^{2} ) + \hat{a}_{3} (T_{1i}^{3} - T_{0i}^{3} )\)

    We drop the logs and subtract both sides by 1 to obtain

    \(\frac{{\hat{y}_{1i} }}{{\hat{y}_{0i} }} - 1 = e^{{\hat{a}_{1} \Delta T_{i} + \hat{a}_{2} (T_{1i}^{2} - T_{0i}^{2} ) + \hat{a}_{3} (T_{1i}^{3} - T_{0i}^{3} )}} - 1\)

    which leads to \(\Delta \hat{y}_{i} = \hat{y}_{i} \left[ {e^{{\tilde{\alpha }_{1} \Delta T + \hat{\alpha }_{2} (T_{1i}^{2} - T_{0i}^{2} ) + \hat{\alpha }_{3} (T_{1i}^{3} - T_{0i}^{3} )}} - 1} \right]\).

  6. Russia,Czech Republic, Poland, Chile, Hungary, South Korea, Turkey, China, Peru, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Brazil, Egypt, Colombia, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editor Nori Tarui and one anonymous referee for their valuable and insightful comments. The responsibility of any remaining errors is ours.

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  1. The W. A. Franke College of Business, Northern Arizona University, PO Box 15066, Flagstaff, AZ, 86011, USA

    Ding Du & Pin Ng

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  1. Ding Du
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Du, D., Ng, P. The impact of climate change on tourism economies of Greece, Spain, and Turkey. Environ Econ Policy Stud 20, 431–449 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10018-017-0200-y

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