Comparing the impact of political instability and terrorism on inbound tourism demand in Syria before and after the political crisis in 2011

ABSTRACT

This paper aimed at estimating the effect of political instability (PI) and terrorism (TERR) on inbound tourism demand in Syria before and after 2011. Utilizing factor analysis and logarithmic regression technique (Cochrane-Orcutt (CO) estimation method), the study revealed that tourism demand is affected negatively by internal rather than external political instability. In general, tourism demand is more sensitive to PI as compared to TERR. Moreover, after the crisis, the impact of PI on tourism demand tends to increase remarkably while that of the TERR diminishes. The results help tourism institutions in developing crisis plans concerning the so-called Arab Spring Revolutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Syria
• time series
• inbound tourism demand(ITD)
• internal tension
• external tension
• political instability(PI)
• terrorism(TERR)
• political crisis(PC)
• accountability
• Arab spring

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Minister of Tourism in Syria for generously providing requested data. As well as we thank Dalian University of Technology for supporting us to come out with this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note the risk variables' data presented above and its description extracted from PRS Group Website. For more details see www.prsgroup.com/ICRG_Methodology.aspx . Click the tab “ ICRG method download”.

2 Islamic development bank. http://data.isdb.org/pxfdrcg/world-bank-development-indicators-wdi-2017-idb-aggregates. Depend on World Bank, world development indicators. https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-indicators

3 WTTC Data Gateway. https://tool.wttc.org/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71640035].