The Turkey Tourism Demand : A Gravity Model

Two significant points are usually overlooked when tourism demand is estimated through gravity models. First, international tourism activity is examined without the aid of economic theory. Consequently, this study uses a utility function to evaluate the tourism demand model. Secondly, gravity model estimations are not done via the appropriate estimation methods. This is because estimations give rise to problem of heteroscedasticity. Therefore, this study utilizes the Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML) method, which accounts for the heteroscedasticity problem. Although our results are similar to the findings in prior literature, it is possible to get different results in terms of tourism demand