DETERMINANTS OF TOURIST INFLOWS IN TURKEY: EVIDENCE FROM PANEL GRAVITY MODEL

Year 2010, Volume: 6 Issue: 11, 33 - 46, 01.06.2010

M. Ozan Saray Kadir Karagöz

Abstract

Turkey is one of the foremost destinations in the world and today, tourism sector has gained importance in the Turkish economy. With a tourism revenue of 16.9 billion USD, Turkey has placed 9th among the top 10 highest revenue earned countries. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that Turkey fully uses her tourism potential which stems from her geographical and historical wealth. Therefore, in order to develop the sector in a most planned and controlled manner, it is important to determine the factors which have impact on Turkey’s tourist inflows. In this paper, we aimed to investigate these effective factors based on a panel gravity model framework for the period of 1992-2007. Though the results are highly sensitive to the specification of the model both in terms of the significance and sign of the coefficients, all variables i.e. the economic size, population and distance seem to have significant effect on tourist inflows

Keywords

Tourist Inflow, Turkey, Panel Gravity Model

TÜRKİYE’YE YÖNELİK TURİST AKIMININ BELİRLEYİCİLERİ: PANEL ÇEKİM MODELİNDEN BULGULAR

Abstract

Turkey is one of the foremost destinations in the world and today, tourism sector has gained importance in the Turkish economy. With a tourism revenue of 16.9 billion USD, Turkey has placed 9th among the top 10 highest revenue earned countries. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that Turkey fully uses her tourism potential which stems from her geographical and historical wealth. Therefore, in order to develop the sector in a most planned and controlled manner, it is important to determine the factors which have impact on Turkey’s tourist inflows. In this paper, we aimed to investigate these effective factors based on a panel gravity model framework for the period of 1992-2007. Though the results are highly sensitive to the specification of the model both in terms of the significance and sign of the coefficients, all variables i.e. the economic size, population and distance seem to have significant effect on tourist inflows.

Keywords

Turist Akımı, Türkiye, Panel Çekim Modeli

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• Appendix: Countries Included in the Sample.
• Albania China Iceland Mexico Singapore
• Argentina Colombia India Australia Austria Denmark Bangladesh Egypt
• Belgium Finland Japan Brazil
• Bulgaria Germany Lebanon Portugal Venezuela
• Canada Greece Luxemburg Chile Hungary
• Netherland Spain New Zealand Czech Rep. Iran Ireland
• Israel Norway Switzerland Italy Sweden Pakistan
• Philippines K. Poland U. S. A. France Jordan Romania Malaysia S. Arabia