The Impact of Tourism Development and Economic Growth on Poverty Reduction in Kazakhstan

Abstract The paper examines the long-run relationship between poverty reduction, economic growth, and tourism development in Kazakhstan during the period of 2001–2017. We expand the basic model by including other poverty determinants such as inequality, unemployment, and spending on health. We use the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to test the co-integration of variables, as the ARDL bound test of co-integration is less restrictive and provides more reliable coefficients than other time series econometric models. The ARDL bound test results show that there exists a long-run relationship between the said variables. The coefficients of all variables have the expected signs in the long run.