Resumen de The effect of freedom on international tourism demand: Empirical evidence from the top eight most visited countries
Umit Bulut, Emrah Koçak, Courtney Suess
The present study investigates the impact of freedom (i.e. the effects of political rights andcivil liberties) on tourist arrivals for the eight countries with the highest tourist arrivals in2016 (France, the United States, Spain, China, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, andMexico), using annual data from 1998 to 2016, through advanced panel data methods.Notably, the key strengths of this study are as follows: (i) it examines the impact of insti-tutional quality on international tourism demand for the most visited countries and (ii) itemploys advanced panel data techniques, whichhave been suggested in recent years. We firstconstituted a freedom index using political rights and civil liberties data. Second, we per-formed cross-sectional dependence (CD) tests to examine whether there existed CD in thepanel data set. After detecting the presence ofCD, we used panel unit root and cointegrationtests, which are robust to CD to avoid problems from spurious regression. Finally, weestimated long-run parameters of the empirical model through a panel data estimator that iscapable of presenting efficient and unbiased output in the presence of CD. Our empiricalfindings show that the level of freedom may play a role in explaining the volume of inter-national tourist arrivals. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed in the study, par-ticularly with respect to the importance of rights and freedom in the context of internationalinbound tourist arrivals.
