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

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.Dr. Charfeddine Lanouar is associate Professor of economics and econometrics at Qatar University. He holds a Ph.D in applied Econometrics in 2007 from University Paris II-Pantheon - Assas, France. His research area include nonlinear models (Switching and long memory processes), financial modeling and forecasting, energy economics, and fiscal and monetary policies. He has published several articles in these topics in internationally respected peer-reviewed journals including the journal of Energy Economics, Energy, Energy Policy, Economic Modeling, Emerging Market Review and Cleaner Energy Production etc. His research was funded by internal and external grants including the QFC and QNRF grants.Scopu

The effect of ICT adoption on labour demand: A cross-region comparison

This paper assesses the information and communications technologies (ICT)-labour relationship from a macroeconomic perspective to clarify some ambiguity regarding the overall employment effect of ICT adoption in the short and long term. For that, we use two panel data techniques, generalized method of moments (GMM) and the pooled mean group model (PMG), on a large sample of developing and developed countries, covering five regions, during the period from 1990-2015. Our findings provide evidence that the overall impact of ICT adoption is labour saving in the short term, and this adverse effect still carries on in the long run, inducing higher structural unemployment. The displacement of the labour market induced by ICT adoption is real, persistent, and universal. Policy-makers should facilitate the transition of labour from old to new jobs and reduce the period of adaptability.This paper has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union within the context of the EMNES project. The contents of this document are the sole responsibility of the authors and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union or the EMNES Network.Scopu

Effects of pro-growth policies on employment: evidence of regional disparities

The main objective of our research is to study the direct impact of pro-growth economic policies on employment creation globally and regionally, as evidence has countered policy-makers’ expectation that output growth leads automatically to job creation. We innovate by using the ratio of employment to the population above 25 years as dependent variable instead of the customary employment elasticity. We apply generalized methods of moments’ econometrics on dynamic panel data models and find that growth stimulates employment creation on average across 76 countries. The policies promoting private sector credit, investments, openness, services, education spending, tertiary enrollment, and a fixed exchange rate are the ones that create employment. Larger government size undermines job creation, while policies promoting FDI and industrial development fail to stimulate employment. However, we establish that the effect of pro-growth policies on employment varies significantly across regions, with evidence of weaker links between economic policies and employment in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.The authors acknowledge the financial assistance of the European Commission within the context of the FEMISE research program (project FEM35-12) for preliminary work on this research. The contents of this document are the sole responsibility of the authors and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union.Scopu

Performance Of Tourism Destinations: Evidence From Tunisia

This study uses data envelopment analysis and a two-stage procedure to compare the performance of Tunisian tourism destinations and to examine the impact of investment (public and private), economic circumstances, workers skills, and travel agent number on the efficiency of Tunisian tourism destinations. In the first stage, the efficiency score is calculated. This calculation is followed in the second stage with a bootstrapped truncated regression model examining the effects of the cited variables to determine the best development strategy that can increase the tourism competitiveness of Tunisian tourism destinations. This study has six major conclusions. First, the test results confirm that the destination efficiency is sensitive to public and private investment in the tourism industry. Second, the trade deficit has a significant negative impact on the efficiency of the country destinations. Third, tourism education and training in Tunisia do not meet the Tunisian tourist market needs. Fourth, the wage level in the tourism sector positively affects the performance of destinations. Fifth, whereas the number of Type A (hold and sell travel) travel agencies positively affects the performance of a destination, Type B agencies (only sell travels) negatively influence it. Last, tourism destinations have to develop commodities, tourism monuments, leisure activities, and other para-tourism activities to attract more tourists or to improve their length of stay.Scopu