Old Wine in New Bottles: Are Malaysia's Tourism Markets Converging?

Abstract

The primary objective of this study is to re-examine the convergence hypothesis for Malaysia's tourism markets for the period January 1995–December 2008. This study employs the recently developed Kapetanios (Journal of Time Series Analysis, 2005, 26(1), 123–133) m-breaks unit root test to assess the possibility of convergence of Malaysia's tourism markets. The results, however, suggest that Malaysia's tourism markets are not consistently converging and only five of the selected markets support the convergence hypothesis. In addition, eight out of 10 selected markets are subjected to more than two structural breaks. According to these findings, the existing tourism marketing policies conducted by Tourism Malaysia may not be effective at capturing certain tourism markets.

Keywords:

• convergence hypothesis
• Malaysia
• tourism markets
• unit root test

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the two anonymous referees. The author would also like to acknowledge Sibly Maros and Soo Khoon Goh for proofreading the first draft of this paper. The usual disclaimer applies.