ABSTRACT
We attempt to establish the relationship between Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) and international tourist footfalls in the USA. In the first stage, we investigate the influence of country-specific EPU and global EPU on tourist footfalls. Since, these two are overlapping in nature, in the second stage, we study the isolated influence of country-specific EPU on footfalls by eliminating the influence of global EPU and vice versa. We consider a study period spanning over January 1997 to April 2017. To capture the variations in the relationship at different time dimensions, we apply wavelet-based techniques. We observe the following: (a) the impact of policy uncertainty shock has a little immediate impact on tourist footfalls, (b) medium to long-run shocks persist due to occurrence of major undesirable economic events, and (c) the influence of domestic (country-specific) EPU is dominant in comparison to global EPU for the USA.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Debojyoti Das http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9756-1266
R. K. Jana http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8564-112X
Aviral Kumar Tiwari http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1822-9263
Notes
1 To express economic and policy uncertainty, events such as US elections, 9/11 terror, 2nd Gulf war, European Debt Ceiling dispute, Global Financial Crisis 2008 and many others. For a detailed information regarding events considered to construct the EPU index, refer: http://www.policyuncertainty.com/methodology.html.
2 For detailed review refer, ‘when disaster strikes airlines scramble’ (14 March 2011), https://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-airlines-do-for-travelers-after-a-natural-disaster-1300126297922, accessed November 9, 2017.
3 Around 2009 amid the global economic uncertainty that started in 2008 caused severe downturn in the tourism industry of the USA. For full report refer http://travel.trade.gov/pdf/2009-year-in-review.pdf, accessed October 14, 2017.