The Impact of financial and non-financial crises on tourism demand: empirical evidence from asian countries

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the impact of financial crises and health related crisis on tourist arrivals of six famous tourism destinations in Asia, namely Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore. This study employs the quantile autoregressive distributed lag model (QARDL) to estimate the long-run and short-run influence of SARS, subprime mortgage crisis and Covid-19 on tourist demand by using quarterly data from 2000:Q1 to 2020:Q4. From the empirical results, firstly, it suggests that economic growth of destinations contribute to higher tourism demand. Secondly, it also finds out that the stability of exchange rate is important to attract tourists. Thirdly, the results shows that SARS and Covid-19 have bigger negative impact on tourism demand in all six destinations than Subprime mortgage crisis, since safety is the first priority when tourists planned their tour. Besides, Covid-19 had the largest impact on the tourism demand in all six destinations among three crisis events since the coefficients of Covid-19 are most negative while Subprime mortgage crisis had the smallest impact. Another findings indicate that asymmetric impact of Covid-19 crisis on tourism demand. The findings of this study provide some suggestions for tourism industry and policy maker in crisis management.