The impact of COVID-19 on Turkey’s tourism sector: fresh evidence from the fractional integration approach

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to analyze whether the profound effects of COVID-19 on Turkey’s tourism sector will be permanent or transitory. Such an investigation deserves attention during the ongoing pandemic due to the importance of Turkey in the international tourism industry. To better understand and analyze the dynamics of tourism, we examine a long period of time spanning from January 1977 to March 2021 using a fractional integration approach. The findings provide clear-cut evidence that the shocks to the tourism sector display very low degrees of persistence in the pre-pandemic period whereas degrees of persistence in the post-pandemic period are very high. We also identify the changes in the persistence of tourism month by month. Overall, the impacts of COVID-19 on Turkey’s tourism will not be transitory. Therefore, the government should be actively involved in the recovery process of the tourism sector if Turkey wants to reach the number of tourist arrivals it once used to host. Also, the methodology employed in this study could be used as a benchmark to explore the impacts of the ongoing pandemic on other sectors (JEL: C22: I15: L83: Z32).

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism
• Turkey
• COVID-19
• persistence
• fractional integration

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1 More specifically, to better capture the effects of COVID-19 on the tourist arrivals, we employed international arrivals of nonresident overnight visitors at national borders. By this definition, the arrivals of the same day visitors spending only a few hours, foreign residents in the host country and Turkish nationals living abroad are excluded.