The tourism-led terrorism hypothesis – evidence from Italy, Spain, UK, Germany and Turkey

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore the causal relationship between terrorism and international tourism arrivals in several selected European tourist destinations. The main goal is to look at this issue from another perspective, i.e. whether the tourism-led terrorism hypothesis can be proved valid in addition to the already established terrorist-led tourism hypothesis. The study used econometric techniques such as the unit root test, the Granger causality test in a vector autoregressive model (VAR model), the analysis of variance decomposition and the impulse response function for the monthly time-series data from 2001 (1) to 2015 (12). Based on the research conducted, it was found that tourism Granger causes terrorism in Turkey, United Kingdom and Germany, while terrorism Granger causes tourism in Italy and Spain.