Impact of Investment in Tourism Infrastructure Development on Attracting International Visitors to Vietnam : A Nonlinear Panel ARDL Approach

Investment in tourism infrastructure development to make destinations and services increasingly attractive is considered a key measure to develop a country’s tourist destinations. This paper investigates the impact of investment in tourism infrastructure components on international visitor attraction using Vietnam data for the period 1995-2019. The results of analyzing panel data by the nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach show that in the long-run, investing in the three components of tourism infrastructure, namely transport and communications infrastructure, the hotel and restaurant industry, and recreation facilities, has a strong and positive impact on international visitor attraction. In addition, different short-run impacts of the three tourism infrastructure components on the whole market and each major international visitor market are also found