The results of the causality will provide governments with useful information to examine
their economic development policy, to adjust priorities
regarding economic investment, and to boost national
economic growth given limited resources. More
resources should be allocated preferentially to the
travel and tourism industry, if the tourism-led
economy hypothesis is supported (Chen and Chiou-
Wei, 2010). Nevertheless, different empirical evidence
shows different policy implications, which cannot
only contribute to distinguishing the innate characters
of the tourism industry, but can also be used as the
basis for how a government can resolve policies
associated with the symbiosis of tourism businesses
and economic development. The use of a kind of
structural change test as described by Gregory and
Hansen (1996), which has not been previously
applied in this area, will provide policymakers with
concrete empirical evidence to support the decision
making process by consideration of the multiple
impacts of tourism on economic development.
Therefore, researcher may need to conduct
research that incorporates other feasible factors in the
models and then policymakers can formulate efficient
policy taking into account the results. However, in
the case of Thailand, the results may lead to a
possible policy implication that tourism may not be
the main factor driving economic development.
Therefore, the Thai government should pay attention
to promoting other sectors in addition to tourism to
expand economic growth. A careful empirical
analysis, such as was applied in the examples
discussed in this paper, is desirable for any country
that may want to focus on the tourism industry as
part of its national economic development policy.
Considering methodology issues, some doubts
have been cast on the appropriateness of model
specification and the omission of important variables
in previous studies. Thus, more future research
incorporating other feasible variables is needed for
model validation. Such possible variables could
include the size of the national economy, the level
of openness of the country as well as the level of
travel restrictions, the degree of dependence on tourism, the tourism destination life cycle, and the
level of economic development. In addition, researchers
may compare multiple countries using the above
variables as intervening factors between economic
development and tourism activity and may then be
able to draw a concrete conclusion regarding
tourism-led economic growth theory.