Does Blockade Deter Inbound Tourism? An Evidence from Qatar

Abstract

While tourism research on Qatar has been growing, the area is still understudied with many untapped research opportunities. This research focuses on the impact of the blockade on international tourist arrivals to Qatar. We adopt a standard tourism demand model and augment it with a blockade variable. To capture the effects of political incidence such as the blockade, we develop a dummy variable that characterizes the periods when the blockade on Qatar occurred. The research model also includes origin-destination characteristic variables, such as tourism competitiveness, corruption perception and trade freedom. The main objective is to investigate whether the inclusion of these control variables can minimize the effects of the blockade. Data are based on an unbalanced panel of 552 observations, with a total of 47 countries of origin from 2007 to 2018. The result confirms the convergence theory of growth (Cuaresmaa, Ritzberger-Gru¨nwald and Silgoner, 2008). The strength and sign of the coefficients for the two economic control variables, namely GDP growth and currency appreciation in the sourced country are as expected- an increase in income in the sourced country increases people’s affordability to travel and in turn enhances growth in tourist numbers in Qatar significantly. Moreover, the coefficients of the main focus variable, the blockade, show the expected negative sign and statistical significance (1% level of significance), implying that the blockade imposes constraints on visitors to Qatar from neighboring countries, which in turn has adverse effect on the number of tourist arrivals.