Impacts of clean water and sanitation on international tourism in South Asia: does quality governance matters?

South Asian countries face a shortage of clean drinking water and have little access to basic sanitation facilities. Furthermore, despite its beautiful landscape, this region has the lowest share of global tourism. Therefore, this study is a baseline attempt to examine the short-term and long-term effects of access to clean drinking water and sanitation on tourism inflow to South Asia from 1995 to 2020. The estimated result of the cross sectional dependence test and CIPS unit root analysis urges using the cross sectional autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) technique. The estimation result of CS-ARDL reveals that GDP per capita and institutional quality significantly impact international tourism in the long run. At the same time, death from unsafe drinking water and sanitation significantly negatively affects it. However, in the short run, only institutional quality reveals a significant positive effect on tourist arrival. The findings urge selected South Asian countries to enhance the quality of government institutions and improve access to clean drinking water and sanitation for the development of the tourism sector. Furthermore, sustainable policies are recommended to attract international tourists and address factors that impede tourism activities.