Museum and monument attendance and tourism flow: A time series analysis approach.

This paper takes a time series analysis approach to evaluate the directions of causality between tourism flows, on the one side, and museum and monument attendance, on the other. We consider Italy as a case study, and analyze monthly data over the period January 1996 to December 2007. All considered series are seasonally integrated, and co-integration links emerge. We focus on the error correction mechanism among co-integrated time series to detect the directional link(s) of causality. Clear-cut results emerge: generally, the causality runs from tourist flows to museum and monument attendance. The non-stationary nature of time series, their co-integration relationships, and the direction of causal links suggest specific implication for tourism and cultural policies.