Are tourism markets of Turkey converging or not? A Fourier stationary analysis

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to investigate the convergence hypothesis of Turkey's tourism markets over the period January 1996–December 2010. We employ a recently introduced Fourier stationary test that does not lose power due to unknown number, form and locations of structural breaks. The results reveal that 10 out of 14 markets support the hypothesis of convergence, which implies that tourism policies for attracting visitor arrivals are effective and new strategies to attract the tourist arrivals from the markets where the convergence hypothesis could not be rejected must be developed to boost the number of visitors coming into Turkey.

Keywords:

• convergence hypothesis
• Fourier stationarity test
• tourism markets

Notes

1 The detailed results for the KPSS test are available from the authors upon request.