Sigiro, Ely Elprida creator Tsusaka, Takuji W. Chairperson Pichdara, Lonn Examination Committee Pramanik, Malay K. Examination Committee DAAD, Government of Germany Scholarship Donor text series theses th Pathum Thani Asian Institute of Technology 2026 continuing eng

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124 leaves : ill.+e1 online resource Tourism is widely regarded as a driver of regional economic development, yet its capacity to reduce poverty depends heavily on how its benefits are distributed across administrative boundaries. In North Sumatra, poverty persists across 33 districts and cities despite a decade of expanding visitor arrivals, and the spatial mechanisms through which tourism effects transmit across district boundaries remain empirically unexamined. This study investigates both direct and indirect effects of tourism on poverty alleviation across all 33 districts and cities in North Sumatra, Indonesia, from 2013 to 2023. The analysis employs balanced panel data obtained from Statistics Indonesia and utilizes a two-way fixed-effects estimation framework in conjunction with the Spatial Durbin Model, which integrates a K-Nearest Neighbor-4 (KNN-4) spatial weights matrix. This empirical technique enables a clear distinction between the impacts observed within specific districts and those resulting from spatial spillovers to neighboring districts. The study evaluates various criteria, including economic performance, infrastructure development, and access to education.The two-way fixed effects model indicates that after controlling for district and year fixed effects, tourism factors do not have statistically significant direct effects on local poverty, except for road infrastructure, which achieves marginal significance. The Spatial Durbin Model confirms strong positive spatial autocorrelation in poverty distribution across districts, with a Moran's I of 0.6577. Two spatial spillover channels emerge as statistically significant. The spatial lag of the average length of stay carries a positive coefficient, indicating that deeper tourist engagement in neighboring hub districts is associated with rising poverty in surrounding peripheral districts, consistent with a labor displacement mechanism. The spatial lag of education carries a negative coefficient, indicating that higher educational attainment in neighboring districts reduces local poverty through cross-border human capital diffusion. A robustness check using queen contiguity spatial weights confirms both findings across alternative specifications. These results indicate that tourism-poverty dynamics in North Sumatra are fundamentally spatial, and that coordinated regional investment in human capital, rather than site-specific tourism infrastructure, is the more effective pathway to broad based poverty reduction across the province. A thesis submitted in patial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Natural Resources Management Thesis (M. Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2026 Tourism Economic aspects Indonesia Sumatera Utara Poverty Indonesia Sumatera Utara Economic development Indonesia Sumatera Utara Asian Institute of Technology. http://203.159.5.9/ait-thesis/detail.php?q=B24137 http://203.159.5.9/ait-thesis/detail.php?q=B24137 260514 20260818221913.0