Exploration of non-traditional factors in tourism demand of ASEAN Plus Three from new perspectives

Abstract

This dissertation aims to integrate non-traditional economic variables such as “tourism flow association, ecological footprint, and information and communication technology” with mainstream factors to re-interpret the impact of them on tourism from a new perspective. In terms of the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI 2019), we know that overall the dependence on tourism, especially international tourism, of ASEAN Plus Three (China, Japan and South Korea) exceeds the global average. Given the active economic role of international tourism in this region, it is important to conduct future research on sustainable tourism development in it. First, we estimated the effect of tourism flow association on tourism demand in this region by performing unconstrained parameter optimization for copula-ARDL. The results show that there is a positive association between the tourism flows in East Asia group, which indicates that their tourism demand is influenced by common factors between each other's countries. However, both positive and negative associations exist in the Southeast Asian group. In specific, Laos has a negative tourism flow association on Malaysia and Singapore, which may be caused by the geographical distance of Laos from the other two countries, and it also confirms from another perspective that it is essential to include tourism flow dependence in tourism demand forecasting. Then, we used Threshold Vector Autoregression (TVAR) and Threshold Vector Error Correction (TVEC) models to verify the existence of high, medium, and low regimes between the non-traditional tourism influencing factor "ecological footprint" and tourism. We found a long-term balanced relationship between them. China and Japan have the strongest fluctuations and the most pronounced shocks under the high regime, but the opposite is a fact for Korea, where the impact is more shocks under the low regime. Next, we constructed the Total Energized Stochastic Frontier model to estimate a multiplier effect on labor and capital by the non-traditional influencing factor ICT, which is 27.92% and 8.82% respectively. This promotes tourism TFP. From the empirical results, there is a trend of growth in total factor productivity of the tourism of the eight sample countries. The technological progress and technical efficiency are the dominant factors that increase tourism TFP changes, which indicates that the development of tourism TFP in this region remains sustainable. Finally, we put forward some policy recommendations for the ASEAN Plus Three region based on the empirical results of this study. At the same time, we also provide implications for the region in the wake of COVID-19 based on empirical results.