Reporters Without Borders and Tourism Industry in Southwest Asian Countries

Governmental and non-governmental organizations and experts have focused on media freedom and reforms in the last two decades. The present study examines the impact of Reporters Without Borders on the profit of the tourism sector in selected countries in Southwest Asia from 2012 to 2018. It investigates this relationship using a dynamic panel data method and a two-stage generalized moment system (GMM). The obtained results indicate that with a unit increase in the Reporters Without Borders index, the income of the tourism industry increases by 1.062%. Also, for other control variables, it can be concluded that with an increase of 1 unit in the good governance index, tourism revenues increased by 0.784 percent, and also with a 1 percent increase in the official exchange rate, the gross domestic product Per capita and trade openness of tourism industry income increases by 0.005, 2.134 and 0.628 percent respectively. It is worth mentioning that all the obtained coefficients were significant and positive.