Estimating Tourism Import Demand Elasticities for Four Countries Using the General-to-specific Approach

Abstract

This paper applied the general-to-specific econometric modelling technique to estimate demand for tourism imports and the corresponding elasticities for four countries: Australia; Canada; Japan and USA. The findings indicate that tourism imports are generally income and price elastic with values ranging from 1.476 to 1.783 for income elasticity and -1.201 to -1.721 for price elasticity. Furthermore, the findings reveal that, after controlling for seasonality in the data, demand for tourism import is influenced by global financial crisis, disasters and country-specific problems. These findings have important implications for tourism import management, especially in the broader context of promoting tourism imports.