Turist Akımında Oynaklık: Türkiye Örneği

Abstract

Tourism sector, like most of the other countries of the world, has also gained importance in Turkey in last few decades. Global tourist flows and tourism income have a steady increase. Hence, as an effective tool for sustainable economic development and welfare, importance of tourism sector is rising. Tourism is a considerable source of an additional income, exchange, employment and tax revenue for most countries. Turkey is one of the prominent tourism destinations for the world tourist flows. Turkish tourism industry began to grow in 1980s with the incentive macroeconomic policies. The industry has been growing in terms of international tourist arrivals and tourism receipts despite some discouraging events, such as economics crisis in the source countries, changing concerns, political incidents etc. For a sustainably growing and productive tourism sector it is essential to reduce the volatility in tourist arrivals. A less volatile tourist inflow may help to policy and decision makers. So, understanding the volatility of demand can reduce the uncertainty and help to develop appropriate policies. This paper aims to conduct such an analysis for Turkey’s inbound tourist flow, using the monthly data for 1996-2011 period. Exploiting alternative modeling techniques to measure and investigate the volatility in international tourist arrivals, the study concluded that the volatility of tourist arrivals to Turkey is asymmetric: positive shocks have a differential impact on future volatility than negative shocks.