Tourism and income inequality in sub-Saharan African countries: the role of democracy

The tourism literature has largely neglected another important factor that may influence the tourism and income inequality relationships. This factor reflects democractic institutions of the destination country. To contribute to the tourism literature, this studyattemmps to fill a gap in the tourism literature by investigating the moderating effect of democracy on the tourism-income inequality nexus for a panel of 23 subSharan African countries over the period 2000-2020. The empirical evidence is based on the panel corrected standard errors (PCSE) estimation technique. The results obtained from our study show that tourism and democracy unconditionally worsen income inequality. Moreover, democracy complements tourism to further undermine income distribution as positive synergies are apparent. Policy implications are discussed.