International Tourism Demand for Turkey: A Dynamic Panel Data Approach

Empirical studies on tourism field for Turkey have illustrated little attention in modelling properly the demand function for tourism and identifying the main basis of tourism flows. The majority of studies take into consideration the demand side determinants of tourism, usually proxies by income and price measurements, and little attention has been given to the supply factors, which might influence substantially the tourism performance. Factors such as infrastructures in networks and accommodation capacity in the hosting country have been ignored in such studies. Taking into accounts these facts, in this paper, a dynamic model is used to estimate the demand function of tourism in Turkey with respect to its nine major clients, Germany, Russia, United Kingdom, Holland, France, Austria, Iran, Bulgaria and Ukraine, for a period of 10 years (1995-2004) by using the GMM-DIFF estimator proposed by Arellano and Bond (1991). One of the main conclusions of the study is the significant value of the lagged dependent variable (0.28), which may be interpreted as a minor word-of-mouth effect on the consumer decision in favour of the destination.