Abstract
The benefits of tourism are widely acknowledged in the literature given the prevalence of its potential towards stimulating economic growth through the development of the domestic industry associated to the tourism sector, the stimulation of the provision of basic infrastructure, and the transfer of necessary technology via inward foreign direct investment. However, whilst the literature is fraught with studies on the determinants of tourism development in the literature, tourism promotion efforts, on the other hand, as an ingredient of tourism demand, have been overwhelmingly neglected by academic researchers. Moreover, the very few studies that could be traced focused exclusively on developed-country cases. As such, the present article attempts to supplement the small amount of literature on tourism-promotion impact for small island states through an assessment of the impact of tourism promotion efforts on tourist arrivals for Mauritius using an autoregressive distributed lag model approach. After controlling for the classical determinants of tourism demand, our analysis interestingly reveals that tourism marketing and promotion is a crucial element for attracting tourists to Mauritius, albeit to a lesser extent than some of the classical ingredients of the tourism equation.