The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic across ASEAN-6 Countries: The Case of Tourism Industry

Abstract

As the global impact of coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has continued to evolve since January 2020, Southeast Asia was one of the first regions hit hard by the contagious disease due to its close geographical proximity to China and heavy dependency on tourism. In this paper, we examine the impact of COVID-19 pandemic across ASEAN-6 countries focusing on tourism industry. For empirical analysis, we use various unit root tests to check whether the time series for international inbound visitors to ASEAN-6 countries satisfy the random walk hypothesis (Shiller & Perron, 1985). If inbound visitors show a unit root (random walk, or non-stationary process), it implies that the shocks to visitor arrivals are permanent. On the other hand, if the visitor arrivals do not reveal a unit root (or stationary process), it indicates that the shocks to visitor arrivals are temporary (Bhattacharya & Narayan, 2005). We find that the effects of COVID-19 on reduction of inbound tourists are transitory for Indonesia and Thailand. While the negative effects of COVID-19 in most of tourist groups of Singapore are permanent. For Malaysia, the temporary effects are revealed on the international visitors from Indonesia, whereas the permanent effects are reported for the inbound tourists from Singapore and China.