Migration and tourism flows to New Zealand

Abstract

This paper uses a gravity model to test whether, all else equal, tourism flows to New Zealand from countries with larger stocks of migrants to New Zealand are larger. It uses an unbalanced panel data set consisting of more than 190 countries that New Zealand has traded with between the years 1981 and 2006. A panel negative binomial model is employed to estimate the multiplicative form of the gravity model. The coefficient of the logarithm of the migrant stock variables is found to be statistically significant, implying that a 10 % increases in immigrants from a country leads to a 2.1 % increase in the number of visitors from that country, all else equal.