Tourist destination competitiveness and ESG performance in the airline industry

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The relevance of corporate environmental, social, and governance performance (ESG) has increased significantly during the last few years. The airline industry is susceptible to such environmental, social, and governance practices, which explains its selection for the analysis purposes in this study. This paper analyzes the influence of the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index and its constituent factors on environmental, social, and governance performance variables in a sample of leading airline companies worldwide with historical data available from 2013 to 2019. The study required analyzing panel data using a panel-corrected standard error model. The results suggest that airlines headquartered in countries with ideal conditions for operating businesses and outstanding information and communication technology readiness show excellent environmental, social, and governance performance. However, the findings also imply that airline companies headquartered in countries with heavy government influence on the airline industry sector measured by the government prioritization of the domestic travel and tourism sector have poor environmental, social, and governance performance. Similarly, the analysis provided evidence that countries well positioned to join national air service arrangements and subscribe to regional trade agreements have airline companies with excellent environmental, social, and governance performance metrics. The reported results can be priceless for policymakers designing national travel and tourism policies to enhance domestic airline firms’ environmental, social, and governance performance.

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    • Table 1. Summary statistics
    • Table 2. Panel corrected standard errors (PCSE) results for ESG’s Pillars versus TTCI’ Sub-indexes
    • Table 3. Panel corrected standard errors (PCSE) results for ESG’s Pillars versus TTCI’ Pillars
    • Conceptualization
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Data curation
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Formal Analysis
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Funding acquisition
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Investigation
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Methodology
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Project administration
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Resources
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Software
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Supervision
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Validation
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Visualization
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Writing – original draft
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu
    • Writing – review & editing
      Juan Dempere, Kennedy Modugu