Does institutional quality affect tourism demand? Evidence from India

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the impact of institutional quality on the international tourism demand of India. To carry out the analysis, the study first analyses the impact of composite institutional quality index and then proceeds to examine the impact of each of the individual components of institutional quality on the international tourism demand of India. The impact of income of the tourist originating countries, tourism price, trade openness and Human Development Index (HDI) on tourism demand has also been examined.Design/methodology/approachThe study employed panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, with data from top 30 tourist originating countries for India for the period of 1995–2016.FindingsThe results indicated that an increase in the income of the tourist originating countries has spillover effects on the development of tourism sector of India. The impact of cost of travel proxied by relative prices between the destination and origin country is found to be negative, however, statistically insignificant. The impact of trade openness and development level of the host country (proxied by HDI) is found to have positive association with the tourism demand. Institutional quality is found to have positive association with international tourism demand of India. Among the individual components of institutional quality, rule of law, regulatory quality, control of corruption and voice and accountability are found to promote the tourism sector development in the economy. Contrarily, the impact of government effectiveness is found to be negative. In the short run, most of the variables were found to support their counterpart results in long run.Practical implicationsThis study has practical implication not only in formulating tourism sector policies of the host countries but also for issuing tourist advisories in tourist originating countries. The study holds that policymakers should work for improving institutional environment of the country such as bureaucracy, legislature, regulatory quality, rule of law and for reducing corruption at all levels so as to ensure a sustained rise in tourist inflows to India.Originality/valueThis study validates the link between institutional quality of a country and international demand for its tourism. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the study is the first attempt that has comprehensively analysed the impact of institutional quality on tourism demand in Indian context which has been generally ignored in the tourism literature.