https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6707-7430
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ABSTRACT
This study examines whether the level of a country's resilience to shocks moderates the link between the size of the tourism industry and the economic policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic using data from 113 countries. The findings suggest that countries with large tourism sectors responded more aggressively by using economic stimulus packages to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, the impact of the tourism sector is moderated by the country's resilience to shocks. The study also finds that both high level of economic resilience and high level of risk quality of a country moderate the link between the tourism sector and the economic policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings of the study suggest that tourism businesses in high resilient countries are better prepared to cope with the disruptive challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and thus needed less assistance from governments. Improving a country's resilience to shocks is an important strategy to minimize the impact of future negative shocks in the tourism sector.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Uzair Ahmed for his assistance in this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 We use the CESI’s fifth update (7 May 2020) by Elgin et al. (Citation2020) to ensure that all economic stimulus packages introduced since countries adopted strict public health measures, restrictions on social gatherings and international travel, are captured.
2 Data on this are available from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-tests-cases-deaths. Based on the data availability, the data on this variable correspond to 23rd or 24th of May, 2020.
3 This approach to distinguish high and low values of a variable is widely used in the economics and management literature (see, e.g. Alkærsig et al., Citation2013; Eichengreen & Gupta, Citation2016; Grjebine & Tripier, Citation2015; Shi et al., Citation2019), including De Groot et al. (Citation2005); Hameed et al. (Citation2010); and Kim et al. (Citation2011).