Does Digitalization Impact Tourism Ecosystem in Cameroon?

The advancement of digitalization, particularly through information systems, has significantly reshaped the tourism industry by altering both operational practices and structural organization, thereby establishing digital infrastructure as a pivotal component of the sector. This transformation has prompted economic stakeholders to increase investments in digital infrastructure to improve connectivity and facilitate access to digital services. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of public digital infrastructure investment on tourism development in Cameroon. To this end, we employed the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model using annual data spanning the period from 2000 to 2021. Tourism development is proxied by tourism receipts, while digitalization is captured through public sector investments in digital technologies. The empirical findings indicate that public digital investment, inflation and foreign direct investment (FDI) are statistically significant and positively associated with tourism receipts in Cameroon. Exchange rate and public investment in security shows a negative effect on tourism receipts, although this effect is not statistically significant. However, the analysis also reveals a temporal asymmetry- in the short term, only foreign direct investment exerts a statistically significant effect on tourism revenues in Cameroon. These findings therefore indicate that the studied variables contribute positively to tourism revenues only over the long term.