Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper examines the role of seawater deterioration in the beta convergence process of tourism demand. We propose an empirical application with observations of tourist arrivals from 2013 to 2019 for 101 municipalities on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. Seawater deterioration is evaluated using a specific indicator of the ecological status of the sea, chlorophyll, derived from images provided by the European Spatial Agency Sentinel-3 satellite. Based on this information, we estimate the beta-convergence specification of tourist arrivals by using a spatial Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR). Our results confirm the existence of an accelerating nonlinear effect of seawater pollution on the beta convergence process of tourism demand. Once a municipality surpasses a threshold value in terms of pollution, tourists who had previously visited popular destinations move to less well-known, less polluted municipalities along the coast. In addition, we find significant spatial spillover effects among municipalities in this process.
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