A New Insight on Tourism-Entrepreneurship Nexus: The Role of Tourism Market Diversification

This study investigates the causality from Tourism Market Diversification (TMD) to entrepreneurial ecosystem and its sub-indexes (attitudes, abilities, and aspirations), across four sub-groups including high-rank, upper-middle-rank, middle-rank, and low-rank countries over the period 2006–2018. Employing the system-Generalized Method of Moments (sys-GMM) estimator of panel data, the result shows that TMD has a positive causal effect on entrepreneurship and its three sub-indexes at the global level. Using lagged values of TMD for up to three years, we found that TMD consistently has contributed the entrepreneurial activity in all countries. This finding suggests the accumulation of TMD in the past few years has a causality effect on the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the future. Tourists who are coming from diversified destinations would enhance the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the destination countries. This is a seminal study that empirically links and validates tourism market diversification with the entrepreneurial ecosystem.