Democratic transition, political risk, economic instability, and tourist inflows: The case of Tunisia (original) (raw)

Tourism, terrorism and political violence in Tunisia: Evidence from Markov-switching models

Tourism Management, 2019

This study investigates the impact of terrorist attacks and political violence on the number of tourist arrivals and overnight stays in Tunisia. The dataset employed consists of monthly data that covers the period from January 2000 to September 2016, which includes several political and terrorist attacks in Tunisia and the region. Empirically, we investigate the true data generating process (DGP) of these two proxies of tourism activity by accounting for four statistical properties that characterize these series: (1) seasonality, (2) unit roots, (3) breaks, and (4) long memory behavior. Our empirical findings show strong evidence of stationarity, five breaks in the tourist arrival time series and spurious long memory behavior. By estimating a 3-state Markov switching model consisting of the mean, trend, and variance, we find that the Tunisian Jasmine revolution and two recent terrorist attacks, one at the Bardo National Museum on March 18, 2015 and the other at the tourist resort at Port El Kantaoui, Sousse on June 26, 2015, played an important role in influencing the tourism activity of the country. Our empirical findings show also that local shocks have a more important impact than international shocks in influencing tourism activity. Interestingly, we find that the effects of terrorist shocks have a long duration compared to political violence shocks. Several security, marketing, and economic policies have been proposed and discussed in the paper.

Nexus Between Political Instability & International Tourism Demand

International Journal of Social Science & Entrepreneurship

The tourism industry promotes a country’s economic growth and creates a positive destination image. However, tourism demand is sensitive to many factors, especially the political stability of destination countries. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of political instability on international tourism demand. To this end, this study implied two-dimensional analyses using the gravity model through pooled ordinary least square (POLS) estimator. We pay special attention to tourism demand distribution by employing a data set of 200 destination countries between 1995 and 2020. Our empirical results depict that political instability in destination countries finds a negative effect on international tourism demand. Moreover, a radical decline in GDP is observed in the sub-period of 2006–2020 due to the global financial crisis and its aftershocks, which badly affect tourists' attraction to destination countries. This study offers new insights for tourism policymakers and bu...

A Neural Network model of the impact of political instability on tourism

The 2013 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), 2013

This paper presents an empirical integration of the dimensions of political instability with traditional exogenous variables, which are usually employed in econometric tourism demand forecasting, within a tourism demand model in order to investigate causal relationships between political instability and tourism. The work uses the POLINST Database, which contains events of political instability from 1977 to 1997 that took place in the Middle East -Mediterranean region. The model is based on a Focused Tapped Delay Line Neural Network (FTDNN) with a sliding time window of 12 months. The evaluation results show that our model can be used to achieve a good estimation of the effects of political instability on tourism. In an extended set of experiments we were able to show the relative importance of the political instability factors on tourism. Finally, our model also allowed to estimated the time lag between a political instability/terrorist event and the reduction of tourist number to the destination.

Effect of political risk shocks on tourism revenue in South Africa: time series analysis

The International Journal of Business and Management, 2016

Although political risk has an impact on all types of businesses, political risk affects tourism business performance in terms of tourist arrivals and tourism revenue because tourists are very sensitive to political risk in host countries. This study analysed the effect of political risk on revenue from the tourism industry in South Africa. The sample period of 108 months from January 2007 to December 2015 was used based on the availability of data. The political risk were measured by the country’s political risk index; whilst tourism revenue was measured by the total monthly income from the entire tourism industry in South Africa. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model was used to test the short-run and long-run relationships between political risk and tourism revenue. Results showed that political risks have a long-run effect on real revenue from the tourism industry but there was no empirical evidence supporting the short-run relationship. Findings of this study suggest ...

ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TOURISM AND POLITICAL STABILITY AND ABSENCE OF VIOLENCE/TERRORISM

2018

Over the decades the tourism has experienced continued growth. It is considered to be one of the most important industries in both, developed and developing, countries. Despite these facts, the growth of tourism in many countries is negatively influenced by political instability, violence or terrorism. A quantitative analysis on the matter is lacking. Therefore, there is a need to take into account these factors and explore potential causal relationship between tourism (TOUR) and political stability and absence of violence/terrorism (PS). This is why this paper aims to feel in the gap in literature by using panel causality analysis and the most recent data to give quantitative evidence on the matter. This paper explores the relevance of political stability and absence of violence/terrorism on tourism in three balanced panels. The first panel contains 98 economies including both developed and developing; the second contains 35 developed economies, while the third panel contains 63 developing economies over the period 2002-2015. A Granger causality test that implements a vector autoregressive (VAR) framework within the panel setting is employed. Besides this, cointegration test is applied. In order to test the sensitivity of the results, to avoid robust errors and to estimate short-and long-run coefficients, we employ a panel ARDL framework. The findings of ARDL model indicate the long-run relationship between PS and TOUR for the panel of 98 economies as well as for developing countries. However, the results on developed countries provide mixed results. A unidirectional relationship running from TOUR to PS is reported. There is strong evidence on the long-run relationship between TOUR and PS while there is no evidence on the short-run relationship.

POLITICAL INSTABILITY AND ITS EFFECTS ON TOURISM

Tourism today is second only to oil as the world's leading export commodity, accounting for global earnings of more than $300 billion, or nearly 25 per cent of total world GNP (Poirier 2000, p30, cited in Dieke, 2000). Over the last two decades, tourism has proved to be the world's fastest growing economic sector, with average growth of 7.1 per cent per year in arrivals and 12.5 per cent in receipts (Poirier 2000, p30, cited in Dieke, 2000). So tourism should be seen as a major industry and a boost to the economy generally through the results or 'flow on' of the multiplier effect in tourism (Elliott 1997). Despite these statistics, apparent growth tourism in many countries falters when confronted with various political instabilities that cause to distract development in tourism. This exploratory paper, which is part of an ongoing major research project, will examine how tourism can be used as a tool for political and ideological goals, how tourism reform occurs by the industry of particularly politically troubled nations, how tourism can be moulded by the political purpose, and the impact political instability has upon the healthy operation of tourism.

Political Violence and Volatility in International Tourist Arrivals - The Case of Sri Lanka

In recent years, a growing body of literature has emerged exploring the link between dramatic fluctuations in tourist arrivals to particular destinations and events such as political violence and financial shocks. Sri Lanka is one such destination which provides a fascinating case study of this link. That is, international tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka have experienced notable fluctuations during the nearly three decades of civil war, particularly between 1983 and 2009. For the first time, an attempt is made in this study to model the conditional mean and conditional variance of the logarithm of monthly tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka. The results reveal a significant seasonal effect in tourist arrivals to Sri Lanka. First, the study demonstrates the existence of a large volatility in monthly tourist arrivals into Sri Lanka from 1978; stemming from the negative publicity in the print and electronic media and the travel warnings issued by Western countries relating to in-country conflict. Furthermore, the results suggest that major war related incidents are strong enough to reduce the tourist arrival numbers by 5.2 per cent per month, compared to a period when peace is restored in the country. Keywords: Tourist arrivals, Peace, volatility, GARCH, Sri Lanka

Impact of geopolitical risk on BIST tourism index and tourist arrivals in Turkey

Impact of geopolitical risk on BIST tourism index and tourist arrivals in Turkey, 2021

This study aims to explore the effects of geopolitical risk on the Borsa İstanbul (BIST) tourism index and tourist arrivals. The effects of the geopolitical risk index on the BIST tourism index and tourist arrivals were analyzed based on the data between January 1998 and October 2020, and the findings were presented. Time series analysis methods were used in the study. To investigate the relationship between variables, it was first tested whether the series of variables are stationary or not. Then, Lee-Strazicich unit root test was applied, considering the structural breaks. Finally, the causality relationship between variables and the direction of this relationship was determined by the Hatemi-J causality test. According to the findings, there is an asymmetrical relationship between Turkey's geopolitical risks with BIST tourism index. The increase in Turkey's geopolitical risks, causes a significant decrease in tourism BIST returns. Likewise, when the risk decreases, BIST tourism returns increase. On the other hand, the reduction of geopolitical risk in Turkey causes an increase in tourist arrivals

Effects of Terrorism and Political Instability on Tourist Behavior: 2016 conflicts in Turkey

The Central European Review of Economics and Management, 2020

Aim: This article investigates the effects of two attacks and a failed coup attempt during 2016 on the tourist behavior. Foreign tourist data for the 2003-2019 period is analyzed to observe irregularities in Turkey’s national tourism income. Design / Research methods: Linear regression, multivariate regression and regression based static forecasting methods are applied for modeling the relationships. These models are supported with statistical tests. Conclusions / findings: Results on this study are in accordance with the current literature in the sense that conflicts in 2016 caused a shift in tourist behavior which in turn impaired the tourism industry in Turkey. Repercussions did not endure longer than expected and Turkish tourism recovered rapidly, only facing a serious loss due to the shift in tourism demand trend. Originality / value of the article: This study makes an addition to the terror and tourism literature, especially for the Mediterranean region and specifically for Tu...

GEOPOLITICAL RISKS AND INTERNATIONAL TOURIST ARRIVALS TO TURKEY: A CAUSALITY STUDY

REVISTA ANAIS BRASILEIROS DE ESTUDOS TURÍSTICOS / ABET, 2021

This study aimed to examine the causal connection between geopolitical risks and Turkey's international tourist arrivals. The causality was tested between risk indices and foreign visitor demand on monthly data. Turkey was selected because many geopolitical risks had occurred in the last two decades and has had a terror risk named PKK for many years. The geopolitical risk indices were created from news based on the issues. The causality was tested using Toda-Yamamoto and asymmetric causality was tested using the Hatemi-J method in the period of 1998-2019. Findings of the study showed that there is unidirectional causality between global risks and tourist arrivals to Turkey, and bi-directional causality between domestic risk and tourist arrivals. Hatemi-J test results support the findings that the causality from positive shocks of risks causes negative shocks of tourist arrivals and vice versa. Herewith, it can be said that tourism demand to Turkey, in the context of foreign visitors, was affected by global or domestic geopolitical risks. This may be a sign that Turkey has a tourism-led terrorism problem targeting Turkey's tourism and economy.