Tourism, insularity, and remoteness: A gravity-based approach

Abstract

This study investigates the sensitivity of bilateral tourism flows to distance, relative prices, and cultural and political proximity variables, with a special focus on small island destinations, using a gravity model. We find that these flows are negatively affected by larger distances between origin and destination countries and by lower gross domestic product (GDP) in both countries. There are significant differences between our subset of islands and other nations. On the one hand, small islands have higher elasticities of demand with regard to distance and destination GDP and are at a disadvantage compared to other destinations since they are small and remote. Furthermore, they have a much higher price elasticity of demand. On the other hand, sharing a common language and a common colonial past with the origin country has a greater positive impact on tourism flows to small islands than to other countries.

Do Regional Trade Agreements Enhance International Tourism Flows? Evidence from a Cross-Country Analysis

“…Following the literature, the populations in the origin and destination countries are included as control variables to explain the influence of country size on the underlying relationship between different types of RTAs and international tourism flows. Similarly, real GDP per capita (at purchasing power parity) in the origin and destination countries are controlled for in order to explain the influence of the level of development on the underlying relationship (Dropsy, Montet, and Poirine 2020; Khalid, Okafor, and Shafiullah 2020; Okafor, Khalid, and Then 2018; Khalid, Okafor, and Burzynska 2021).…”

The effect of virtual proximity and digital adoption on international tourism flows to Southern Europe

“…Extensions to this framework, which were specifically applied to tourism gravity models, evolved into more complex formulations (Morley et al, 2014) where flows between two countries are treated as "a function of a matrix of interrelated factors that includes the public and private sector structures supporting flows, diplomatic relations, and economic and noneconomic factors" (Prideaux, 2005: 781). Therefore, the latest empirical studies have adopted the augmented version of the gravity model combining a variety of factors such as real exchange rates (Khan et al, 2021), consumer price index (Altaf, 2021), temperature difference (Cró et al, 2021), colonial links (Cevik, 2020), political instability (Ibragimov et al, 2021), infectious diseases (Cevik, 2020), common border (Ibragimov et al, 2021;Groizard et al, 2021), and common language (Dropsy et al, 2020;Okafor et al, 2021). One of the most likely contemporary forces to influence international tourism flows is related to the source market´s level of digitalization development and access to digital platforms, as a factor that eases information asymmetry issues (Baggio and Baggio, 2013).…”

The non-sovereign territories: Economic and environmental challenges of sectoral and geographic over-specialisation in tourism and financial services

“…This bias is less strong for UK territories yet almost all have metropolitan shares in excess of the UK's global population share (less than 1%). As with trade in goods, disproportionately strong tourism links with metropoles may be the result of good transport links as well as shared language, culture and religion, all of which boost tourism flows significantly (Dropsy et al, 2020). Further, the average weighted great circle distance of tourist travel to territories and small states are broadly similar (column 6) in spite of territories being predominantly islands, including some of the most remote the three largest World Bank global sub-regions, where the weights are the absolute number of tourists from a given origin.…”