Does Infrastructure Alleviates Poverty in Developing Countries?

Infrastructure has largely been ignored in the assessment of poverty in developing countries. This paper attempts to make some contribution in the establishing the ingredients to alleviate poverty by exploring the impact of infrastructure on the urban poor in sample of 20 developing countries, over the period 1980-2005. The results from the static fixed effect and also the dynamic GMM model both reveal that transport and communication infrastructure are indeed an efficient tool in fighting urban poverty. Panel causality analysis also validated the results. Hence the main policy concern is how to improve access of the urban poor to such an asset.Urban Poverty, Infrastructure, Developing Countries

Do marketing promotion efforts in the tourism industry really matter? The case of Mauritius

Research on the determinant of international tourism has so far neglected tourism promotion efforts as a potential factor in the tourism demand equation. Moreover the few studies focused exclusively on developed country cases and till now no studies have been undertaken for small island states for which tourism accounts significantly to their economies. Research works have also failed to adequately investigate the time series properties of the data. The paper thus attempts to fill in the above gaps in and add new insights to the literature by focusing on the contribution of tourism promotion efforts on tourist arrival for the case of the small island state of Mauritius using an ARDL approach. Analysis of the results reveals that tourism marketing and promotion is indeed a significant element, though as not as sizeable as other classical ones, in the tourism equation

Transport Capital as a Determinant of Tourism Development: A Time Series Approach

Little serious research has been undertaken into the significance of transport as a factor in destination development despite being acknowledged by many writers. The paper aims at identifying and quantifying the factors that made Mauritius attractive to tourists and also to more importantly to investigate the importance transportation capital in the overall destination’s attractiveness. The novelty of this paper is that is extends a classical demand for international tourism function to include a proxy of public capital stock which has been decoupled into transport and non-transport infrastructure, and also uses co-integration analysis to model the determinants of tourism for a small island economy case. Results from the analysis show that transport capital stock of the country has been contributing positively of the number of tourist arrival in both short and long run. Tourism infrastructure is reported to be a more important ingredient than transport in the tourism equation. Non transport infrastructure, though having a positive sign, was however found to be insignificant. The study thus highlights the importance of transport capital in adding to the value of service and experience received by tourism

Transport Capital as a Determinant of Tourism Development: A Time Series Approach

Little serious research has been undertaken into the significance of transport as a factor in destination development despite being acknowledged by many writers. The paper aims at identifying and quantifying the factors that made Mauritius attractive to tourists and also to more importantly to investigate the importance transportation capital in the overall destination’s attractiveness. The novelty of this paper is that is extends a classical demand for international tourism function to include a proxy of public capital stock which has been decoupled into transport and non-transport infrastructure, and also uses co-integration analysis to model the determinants of tourism for a small island economy case. Results from the analysis show that transport capital stock of the country has been contributing positively of the number of tourist arrival in both short and long run. Tourism infrastructure is reported to be a more important ingredient than transport in the tourism equation. Non transport infrastructure, though having a positive sign, was however found to be insignificant. The study thus highlights the importance of transport capital in adding to the value of service and experience received by tourism

A comparative analysis of tourism destination demand in Portugal

Tourism has experienced different levels of development in the different regions of Portugal. To frame this development, in this paper dynamic panel data models were estimated with the objective of explaining the evolution of international overnight stays in each region. Secondary data from 2000 to 2011 was used. The analysis includes the main tourism source markets for Portugal, such as the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, France and Spain. The tourism literature suggests that, among others, the main determinants of tourism demand are income (GDP), household consumption, unemployment rate and the harmonised consumer price index. Per capita income, unemployment rate and final household consumption were identified as the most shared explanatory variables in each tourism region. However, in some regions, the high elasticity with respect to per capita income was confirmed, suggesting that tourism is a luxury good. It is observed that, although significant, the explanatory power of these variables varies according to the origin and the destination region considered. Findings suggest heterogeneous behaviour of the main international tourism demand by region. Furthermore, results also suggest some implications for public and private tourism authorities. Stakeholders can update the analysis, trends and forecasts of international tourism demand, put forward in the National Strategic Plan for Tourism for the period from 2013 to 2015, by taking into account the different macroeconomic variables that help explain international overnight stays in each region of Portugal. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Does Infrastructure Matter In Tourism Development?

This paper investigates the significance of infrastructure as a factor in destination development. The classical demand for international tourism function is extended to include a proxy for infrastructure. An application involving the island of Mauritius is presented whereby total tourist arrivals as well as arrivals from Europe/America, Asia and Africa are modelled. The  findings show that tourists are sensitive to the infrastructure of the island, particularly those from Europe/America and Asia. Tourism infrastructure, income of tourists, distance, and relative prices are important ingredients in their own respect in the tourism demand equation.Keywords: Infrastructure, Tourism, Dynamic Panel dat

Tourism and growth: The times they are a-changing

(no abstract available

How strong is the linkage between tourism and economic growth in Europe?

In this study, we examine the dynamic relationship between tourism growth and economic growth, using a newly introduced spillover index approach. Based on monthly data for 10 European countries over the period 1995{2012, our analysis reveals the following empirical regularities. First, the tourism-economic growth relationship is not stable over time in terms of both magnitude and direction, indicating that the tourism{led economic growth (TLEG) and the economic{driven tourism growth (EDTG) hypotheses are time{dependent. Second, the aforementioned relationship is also highly economic event{dependent, as it is influenced by the Great Recession of 2007 and the ongoing Eurozone debt crisis that began in 2010. Finally, the impact of these economic events is more pronounced in Cyprus,Greece, Portugal and Spain, which are the European countries that have witnessed the greatest economic downturn since 2009. Plausible explanations of these results are provided and policy implications are drawn

Forecasting U.S. Tourist arrivals using optimal Singular Spectrum Analysis

This study examines the potential advantages of using Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) for forecasting tourism demand. To do this it examines the performance of SSA forecasts using monthly data for tourist arrivals into the United States over the period 1996 to 2012. The SSA forecasts are compared to those from a range of other forecasting approaches previously used to forecast tourism demand. These include ARIMA, exponential smoothing and neural networks. The results presented show that the SSA approach produces forecasts which perform (statistically) significantly better than the alternative methods in forecasting total tourist arrivals into the U.S. Forecasts using the SSA approach are also shown to offer a significantly better forecasting performance for arrivals into the U.S. from individual source countries. Of the alternative forecasting approaches exponential smoothing and feed-forward neural networks in particular were found to perform poorly. The key conclusion is that Singular Spectrum Analysis (SSA) offers significant advantages in forecasting tourist arrivals into the US and is worthy of consideration for other forecasting studies of tourism demand