Quantile dependence of tourism activity between Southern European countries

ABSTRACT

Using monthly data on arrivals at tourist accommodation establishments, we estimate the quantile dependence of tourism activity between four Southern European countries: Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. We find evidence of strong positive dependence between tourism activities across a wide range of quantiles. Most of the dependence is driven by right-tail events; i.e. tourism sectors seem to grow together. Our results, therefore, suggest that the efforts of a joint European tourism policy appear to have some merit, as tourism activity already behaves similarly across countries, and therefore, pursuing joint policies should be less risky and less difficult to implement.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism
• Southern Europe
• cross-quantilogram
• tourism growth

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• L52
• L83

Acknowledgments

Lyócsa appreciates the support provided by the Slovak Grant Agency under Grant No. 1/0257/18. Litavcová appreciates the support provided by the Slovak Grant Agency under Grant No. 1/0470/18.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Among Southern European countries, Croatia, Malta and Cyprus have larger shares of travel and tourism in the GDP, but Croatia is not a member of the EMU, and Malta and Cyprus are much smaller countries that are left for separate research.

² World Travel and Tourism Council (2015) data.

³ In the section on sensitivity analysis, we also comment on the analysis that is based on the total nights spent.

⁴ In the regression of tourism growth on monthly dummy variables, we were unable to identify systematic monthly patterns.

⁵ We use the rugarch package from Ghalanos (2018) to estimate the ARMA-GARCH models.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Vedecká Grantová Agentúra MŠVVaŠ SR a SAV [1/0257/18,1/0470/18].