Symptoms of complexity in a tourism system

Tourism destinations behave as dynamic evolving complex systems, encompassing numerous factors and activities which are interdependent and whose relationships might be highly nonlinear. Traditional research in this field has looked after a linear approach: variables and relationships are monitored in order to forecast future outcomes with simplified models and to derive implications for management organisations. The limitations of this approach have become apparent in many cases, and several authors claim for a new and different attitude. While complex systems ideas are amongst the most promising interdisciplinary research themes emerged in the last few decades, very little has been done so far in the field of tourism. This paper presents a brief overview of the complexity framework as a means to understand structures, characteristics, relationships, and explores the implications and contributions of the complexity literature on tourism systems. The objective is to allow the reader to gain a deeper appreciation of this point of view.Comment: 32 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; accepted in Tourism Analysi

Democracy and External Shock Resilience in Developing Countries. Evidence from the Great Recession

While some developing countries appear to have been largely unaffected by the Great Recession that originated in advanced economies, others took a severe blow in 2008-2009. A number of recent studies have attempted to explain the observed heterogeneity of developing country growth performances during the latest global financial and economic crisis by linking it to pre-crisis macro-economic and financial country features - with rather mixed success. In this newly emerging body of research, surprisingly little attention has, however, been paid to institutional differences between countries, and the variation in political institutional arrangements more particularly. The current paper takes a first shot at bridging this hiatus by gauging the impact of democracy on the crisis growth of developing countries. From a theoretical point of view, and as suggested in the political economy literature, democracy could be either growthretarding or growth-enhancing in times of economic crisis, the overall effect ultimately being an empirical question. Using a cross-section sample of more than 100 non-advanced countries and controlling for a range of macroeconomic, financial and standard institutional factors as well as pre-crisis trends, we find evidence suggesting that, on the whole, democratic country features are negatively correlated with growth performance during the 2008-2009 global crisis. Our findings are seemingly robust to the use of various sets of controls, different estimators, several country subsamples and alternative measures of democracy and crisis growth.Global Financial Crisis, Growth, External Shocks, Democracy

Assessing the Resilience of ASEAN Banking Systems: The Case of the Philippines

Since the global financial crisis in 2008/09 there has been heightened concern about the resilience of banking systems in Southeast Asia. This paper proposes a methodology that uses a macroprudential perspective to assess the resilience of banking systems in member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. It then proceeds to apply this methodology to examine the resilience of the Philippine banking system. Data on financial soundness in the Philippine banking system are utilized in a vector autoregression model to study the dynamic relationships that exist among financial and macroeconomic indicators. Using impulse response functions, a simulation of financial ratios in the banking system is conducted by assuming unlikely but plausible stress scenarios to determine whether banking system credit and capital could withstand the impact of such circumstances. In the stress scenarios, the estimated impact of macroeconomic shocks on nonperforming loan and capital adequacy ratios is generally minimal. The results, however, do suggest that the Philippine banking system has some vulnerability to interest rate and stock market shocks. The results of such stress testing provide a better understanding of the level of preparedness required for managing risks in the financial system, especially in the wake of continuing global economic uncertainty.Banking System; Macroprudential; Stress Testing; Philippines; Panel VAR

A non-linear Granger-causality framework to investigate climate-vegetation dynamics

Satellite Earth observation has led to the creation of global climate data records of many important environmental and climatic variables. These come in the form of multivariate time series with different spatial and temporal resolutions. Data of this kind provide new means to further unravel the influence of climate on vegetation dynamics. However, as advocated in this article, commonly used statistical methods are often too simplistic to represent complex climate-vegetation relationships due to linearity assumptions. Therefore, as an extension of linear Granger-causality analysis, we present a novel non-linear framework consisting of several components, such as data collection from various databases, time series decomposition techniques, feature construction methods, and predictive modelling by means of random forests. Experimental results on global data sets indicate that, with this framework, it is possible to detect non-linear patterns that are much less visible with traditional Granger-causality methods. In addition, we discuss extensive experimental results that highlight the importance of considering non-linear aspects of climate-vegetation dynamics