Assessing the Effect between Ecological Footprint and Tourism in China, Japan, and South Korea

This paper examines the impact of ecological footprint and tourism, economic growth, and energy consumption in China, Japan, and Korea from 1980–2017. Using the threshold VAR and threshold VEC models to identify the three countries with two thresholds, reasonably represent their responses to the changes of structure in different regimes (high, medium, and low). Since the order of variables is not invariant, we use the generalized impulse response function with stronger robustness to explore how the shock of ecological footprint affects the other three factors and propose corresponding policies to facilitate sustainable development in different countries. This study also simultaneously complements the literature on the impact of ecological footprints on tourism, economic growth, energy consumption.