exchange rate policy for developing countries according to the imf in the mid 1970 s approximately 85 percent of developing countries had pegged exchange rate arrangements since then the situation has changed drastically today most developing countries have either managed floats or flexible exchange rates argentina hong kong and a few others may persevere with their currency boards additional nations may well imitate them and movements toward common currencies a la the european union may gain strength here and there nonetheless it seems clear that the political and financial prerequisites to adopt such hard pegs are extremely stringent new attempts are the exception not the rule the question for most emerging market economies is no longer to float or not to float but how to float in this note we review some key issues in defining the right answer to this question

a test of the wagner s hypothesis for the fiji islands in this article we examine wagner s law for fiji for the period 1970 to 2002 using the johansen 1988 test for cointegration we find one cointegration relationship between national output and government expenditure using five different long run estimators we find robust results on the impact of national income on government expenditure the elasticity ranges from 1 36 to 1 44 implying that a 1 increase in income leads to a 1 36 1 44 increase in government expenditure moreover we find that in the long run national income granger causes government expenditure while these results are consistent with wagner s law we warn policy makers that because fiji s total debt stands at around 69 of gdp in future the bulk of expenditure will go towards debt financing at the expense of productive sectors

time series forecasts of international travel demand for australia abstract this paper analyses stationary and non stationary international tourism time series data by formally testing for the presence of unit roots and seasonal unit roots prior to estimation model selection and forecasting various box jenkins autoregressive integrated moving average arima models are estimated over the period 1975 1 1989 4 for tourist arrivals to australia from hong kong malaysia and singapore the mean absolute percentage error and root mean squared error rmse are used as measures of forecast accuracy as the best fitting arima model is found to have the lowest rmse this model is used to obtain post sample forecasts tourist arrivals data for 1990 1 1996 4 are compared with the forecast performance of the arima model for each origin market the fitted arima model forecasts tourist arrivals from singapore for the period 1990 1 1996 4 very well although the arima model outperforms the seasonal arima models for hong kong and malaysia the forecasts of tourist arrivals are not as accurate as in the case of singapore

cointegration analysis of german and british tourism demand for greece abstract germany and great britain are traditionally two of the most important sources of tourism for greece the purpose of this paper is to investigate changes in the long run demand for tourism to greece by these two countries in order to explain the demand for tourism we are using a number of leading macroeconomic variables including income in origin countries germany and great britain tourism prices in greece and transportation cost and exchanges rates between the three countries annual data from the three countries covering the period from 1960 to 2000 are employed augmented dickey fuller test for unit root is examined in the univariate framework and johansen s maximum likelihood procedure is used to test the cointegration method and to estimate the number of cointegrating vectors of var model error correction models are estimated to explain german and british demand for tourism to greece

does inflation targeting improve fiscal discipline abstract we explore the performances of inflation targeting it adoption in terms of fiscal discipline fd while most existing studies focus exclusively on the role of fd as a precondition for it adoption using a sample of developing and developed countries we show that it adoption exerts a positive and significant effect on fd a result robust to a wide variety of alternative specifications in addition this effect is statistically significant only in developing countries a result that may fuel the current debate regarding the relevance of it adoption in general and particularly for developing countries

a model of tourism destination choice a theoretical and empirical analysis abstract in recent years tourism has become one of the fastest growing sectors of the world economy and is widely recognised for its contribution to regional and national economic development the main aim of the paper is to propose a methodological framework within which the impact of characteristics of a tourism product on foreign travel can be captured and analysed this is achieved by combining the lancasterian product characteristics approach with the koppelman s consumer transportation model within the proposed model the characteristics of the tourism product destination including quality of service advertising and political instability are combined to generate a perception feeling regarding the tourism destination in the mind of the tourists in order to measure these perceptions feelings and hence develop a preference ordering the model is estimated by utilising a conditional logit analysis the analysis is based on primary data collected from tourists visiting cyprus the conditional logit model generates the probability of revisit given the characteristics of tourists and the cyprus tourism product the paper extends further the lancaster product characteristics framework as applied to tourism by rugg rev econom stat 55 1 1973 64 morley ann tourism res 19 1992 250 and papatheodorou ann tourism res 28 2001 164 by including the neglected but from any viewpoint important political instability characteristic that is attached to the tourist product of cyprus the inclusion of product characteristics attributes in tourism analysis appear to strongly contribute towards the better understanding of travel choice behaviour

inflation targeting in emerging market and transition economies lessons after a decade abstract starting in the early 1990s several emerging market and transition economies adopted inflation targeting it in this paper we discuss a number of issues that arise in this context a the definition of it b the role of preconditions for it c the use of intermediate exchange rate targets and d the specification of inflation targets our overall conclusion is that suitably modified it is a useful policy strategy for emes

did rabuka s military coups have a permanent effect or a transitory effect on tourist expenditure in fiji evidence from vogelsang s structural break test abstract the central aim of this paper is to investigate whether the military coups instigated by major general sitiveni rabuka in 1987 had a permanent effect or a transitory effect on tourist expenditures in fiji to accomplish this aim we use the vogelsang econ theory 13 1997 818 test for one break in linear trending data the vogelsang test reveals 1988 as the year of the break and based on a suite of test statistics recommended by vogelsang we reject the unit root null leading to the conclusion that rabuka s coups had a transitory effect on tourist expenditure in fiji

a methodology for measuring food poverty applied to kenya abstract this paper proposes a new way of establishing a food poverty line taking into account regional food preferences and prices it uses this poverty line to derive a food poverty measure which satisfies the desirable fundamental properties of such measures and has the additional advantage of being additively decomposable the measurement of food poverty is further generalized to heterogeneous groups of households facing different sets of relative prices and exhibiting different food preferences finally the above methodology is applied to the empirical estimation of food poverty among kenyan smallholders and the results contrasted with those obtained by two other methods

i ve been to bali too and i will be going back are terrorist shocks to bali s tourist arrivals permanent or transitory international visitor arrivals to bali are examined using univariate and panel lagrange multiplier lm unit root tests with one and two structural breaks to ascertain if shocks to the time path of tourist arrivals are permanent or transitory the univariate lm unit root tests with one and two structural breaks fail to reject the null hypothesis of a unit root in international visitor arrivals to bali however the panel lm unit root tests with one and two structural breaks applied to a panel of bali s 11 major source markets reject the null and support the alternative hypothesis of a joint trend stationary series with transitory shocks this result suggests that the effects of the recent terrorist acts on bali on the growth path of tourist arrivals from major markets are only transitory and that as a consequence bali s tourism sector is sustainable in the long run

impacts of crisis events on international tourism demand in thailand in thai this study assesses the impacts of nine major crisis events during 2001 2009 on the number of foreign tourists in thailand the sarima with intervention models and x 12 arima are applied the results show that each crisis had a different effect on the number of tourists depending on the duration of situation type of crisis and country of origin the disease outbreaks had a greater impact than the other crises but the degree of impact was likely to decrease should a similar outbreak occurs in contrast the impact from the internal political chaos was relatively small when it occurred for the first time but would be greater if it recurred the indian ocean tsunami of 2004 had a huge impact but recovery was faster than that of other crises the 9 11 event made a minimal impact on thai tourism based on the results it is suggested that solving the internal politics should be the first priority if government aims to enhance thailand s tourism industry in addition the measures used for solving crises should be designed to fit each foreign tourist markets diverse responsiveness

integrating forecasting and cge models the case of tourism in scotland abstract information about current and forecast levels of tourism and its contribution to the economy is important for policy making by businesses and governments traditional forecasting methods can provide reasonable forecasts in the context of predictable changes however forecasting becomes problematic in the context of both predictable changes and less predictable domestic or international shocks this paper demonstrates the ways in which an integrated model combining traditional forecasting methods and quantifiable forecasts from a computable general equilibrium model can be used to examine combinations of events the model is applied to scotland and combines tourism indicators with structural time series forecasting and cge impact analysis results are provided for changes in exchange rates income of major origin countries and a positive shock to tourism demand to demonstrate the integrated model s ability to take account of the multiple events that affect tourism destinations

forecasting u s tourist arrivals using optimal singular spectrum analysis this study examines the potential advantages of using singular spectrum analysis ssa for forecasting tourism demand to do this it examines the performance of ssa forecasts using monthly data for tourist arrivals into the unites states over the period 1996 to 2012 the ssa forecasts are compared to those from a range of other forecasting approaches previously used to forecast tourism demand these include arima exponential smoothing and neural networks the results presented show that the ssa approach produces forecasts which perform statistically significantly better than the alternative methods in forecasting total tourist arrivals into the u s forecasts using the ssa approach are also shown to offer a significantly better forecasting performance for arrivals into the u s from individual source countries of the alternative forecasting approaches exponential smoothing and feed forward neural networks in particular were found to perform poorly the key conclusion is that singular spectrum analysis ssa offers significant advantages in forecasting tourist arrivals into the us and is worthy of consideration for other forecasting studies of tourism demand

representing tourists heterogeneous choices of destination and travel party with an integrated latent class and nested logit model abstract aiming at a better understanding of heterogeneous interdependencies between destination and travel party choices in tourism this study attempts to simultaneously represent these two choices by integrating the nested logit model with the latent class modeling approach to accommodate both types of nested model structures together empirical analysis confirmed the effectiveness of the developed model using a data collected from more than 2000 tourists in japan it was observed that on average the two types of nested model structures are almost equally shared by samples and the model structures could significantly vary with income level and gender influential factors related to choices of destination and travel party were also explored concretely speaking travel time attractiveness of destination and number of tourism spots were found to be important influential factors in destination choice and gender age marital status have important effects on travel party choice

events in indonesia exploring the limits to formal tourism trends forecasting methods in complex crisis situations the desire to know the future is as old as humanity for the tourism industry the demand for accurate foretelling of the future course of events is a task that consumes considerable energy and is of great significance to investors this paper examines the issue of forecasting by comparing forecasts of inbound tourism made prior to the political and economic crises that engulfed indonesia from 1997 onwards with actual arrival figures the paper finds that current methods of forecasting are not able to cope with unexpected crises and other disasters and that alternative methods need to be examined including scenarios political risk and application of chaos theory the paper outlines a framework for classifying shocks according to a scale of severity probability type of event level of certainty and suggested forecasting tools for each scale of shock

transfer benefits from public works employment evidence for rural india current knowledge provides little guidance on one of the key questions in evaluating public employment schemes aimed at directly reducing poverty what are the net income gains to participating workers this paper offers an answer for rural public employment in two villages in the state of maharashtra in india a model of intrahousehold time allocation is proposed and estimates are made using household data over six years the empirical implementation indicates that the projects induce significant behavioral responses transfer benefits are large and are greatly underestimated using prevailing market wage rates for similar work to estimate forgone incomes copyright 1994 by royal economic society

combining forecasts encompassing and the properties of uk macroeconomic forecasts the idea of combining forecasts is of great interest to forecasters and a linear combination of different forecasts can be more accurate than any individual forecast for model builders forecast encompassing is a way of checking whether any extra important information is contained in forecasts from rival models efficient forecasts have errors which are unrelated to any information available when they are formed combinations of forecasts forecast encompassing and efficiency tests can all be achieved by a restricted or unrestricted regression of outcomes on the separate forecasts this paper links these three approaches and examines the implications for recent uk annual forecasts

intrahousehold inequality and the theory of targeting the two literatures on targeting and on intrahousehold inequality have developed rapidly over the past 15 years but largely independent of each other the literature on targeting concerns itself with the design of tax and transfer programs for poverty alleviation in the presence of limited information on who the poor are the literature on intrahousehold inequality arose out of a dissatisfaction with unitary models of the household especially in explaining inequality in consumption and achievements of different household members even after allowing for relevant differences among them the authors begin to forge the link between the two literatures so they can address issues policymakers face around the world after a brief reprise of the key features of the two literatures they indicate how the presence of intrahousehold inequality and allocation mechanisms could affect the standard analysis of targeting theory they conclude with a list of policy questions for further research this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the structuralist theory of imported inflation an application to south africa this study emphasizes the importance of identifying the origin of inflation in the present context of inflation targeting by many emerging market and transition economies the analysis shows based on south african data how structural supply and demand inflation can be distinguished the results indicate that south africa s inflation experience between 1973q1 and 1998q4 is characterized by two monetary regimes during the first regime 1973q1 1984q4 the long run cause of inflation is demand pull the second regime 1987q1 1998q4 represents major changes to structural imported and cost push inflation the two year period 1985 1986 signifies structural change from the first to the second regime moreover the results in the second regime remain robust when the inflation model is subjected to new out of sample data until 2001q2 evidence of structural imported inflation in the second regime suggests that inflation should not entirely be squeezed out of the system nor should it necessarily be k

assessing the welfare impacts of public spending an important objective of public spending is to raise household living standards particularly for the poor but how can final impacts on this objective best be assessed evaluating a policy s impact requires assessing how different things would have been in its absence but the counterfactual of no intervention is tricky to quantify the author surveys the methods most often used to assess the welfare effects of public spending limitations of current practices are studied and implications for future best practices are drawn the methods used to assess welfare impacts broadly fall into two groups benefit incidence studies and behavioral approaches benefit incidence studies ignore behavioral responses and second round effects using the provision cost as a proxy for benefits received behavioral approaches present quite different drawbacks in attempting to represent individual benefits correctly a number of recent studies usefully combine both approaches it is still uncertain whether behaviorally consistent methods actually point to fundamentally different policy recommendations what can be concluded is that we need to diversify and compare results from our evaluation methods and broaden our definition of well being to see how various facets of living standard are affected by public spending

tourism demand modelling and forecasting a review of recent research abstract this paper reviews the published studies on tourism demand modelling and forecasting since 2000 one of the key findings of this review is that the methods used in analysing and forecasting the demand for tourism have been more diverse than those identified by other review articles in addition to the most popular time series and econometric models a number of new techniques have emerged in the literature however as far as the forecasting accuracy is concerned the study shows that there is no single model that consistently outperforms other models in all situations furthermore this study identifies some new research directions which include improving the forecasting accuracy through forecast combination integrating both qualitative and quantitative forecasting approaches tourism cycles and seasonality analysis events impact assessment and risk forecasting

tourism trade and growth the case of cyprus although the relationship between international trade and economic growth has found a wide application area in the literature over the years this can not be said about tourism and growth or trade and tourism this study employs the bounds test for cointegration and granger causality tests to investigate a long run equilibrium relationship between tourism trade and real income growth and the direction of causality among themselves for cyprus results reveal that tourism trade and real income growth are cointegrated thus a long run equilibrium relationship can be inferred between these three variables on the other hand granger causality test results suggest that real income growth stimulates growth in international trade both exports and imports and international tourist arrivals to the island furthermore growth in international trade both exports and imports also stimulates an increase in international tourist arrivals to cyprus and finally real import growth stimulate growth in real export

is there a unit root in the inflation rate new evidence from panel data models with multiple structural breaks in this article we examine whether or not the inflation rate for 17 oecd countries can be modelled as a stationary process we find that 1 conventional univariate unit root tests without any structural breaks generally reveal that the inflation rate contains a unit root 2 the kpss univariate test with multiple structural breaks reveals that for 10 out of 17 countries inflation is stationary and 3 the kpss panel unit root test reveals strong evidence for stationarity of the inflation rate for panels consisting of countries which were declared nonstationary by univariate tests

testing for the random walk hypothesis in the case of visitor arrivals evidence from indian tourism testing for the random walk hypothesis which asserts that a series is a non stationary process or a unit root process in the case of visitor arrivals has important implications for policy if for instance visitor arrivals are characterized by a unit root then it implies that shocks to visitor arrivals are permanent however if visitor arrivals are without a unit root this implies that shocks to visitor arrivals are temporary this study provides evidence on the random walk hypothesis for visitor arrivals to india using the recently developed im et al 2003 and maddala and wu 1999 panel unit root tests both tests allow one to reject the random walk hypothesis implying that shocks to visitor arrivals to india from the 10 major source markets have a temporary effect on visitor arrivals

rural works programs in india costs and benefits abstract a sequential applied general equilibrium model of the indian economy is used for analyzing the costs and benefits of a rural works program designed to provide employment during slack agricultural seasons through the creation of productive assets such as roads irrigation works schools etc it is shown that such a program if carried out efficiently targeted effectively and financed in a way that does not jeopardize long term growth can be a very effective instrument for alleviating rural poverty in india

a fractionally integrated autoregressive moving average approach to forecasting tourism demand the primary aim of this paper is to incorporate fractionally integrated arma p d q arfima models into tourism forecasting and to compare the accuracy of forecasts with those obtained by previous studies the models are estimated using the volume of monthly international tourist arrivals in singapore empirical findings demonstrate the evidence that the approach we propose generates relatively lower sample mean absolute percentage errors mapes this study also deals with the volatile data faced by a forecaster we use the asian financial crisis and the september 11 event as examples of economic and political shocks with respect to the objective of shaving the coefficient mape forecasts based on the selected arfima models dominate convincingly

allocation of goods through non price mechanisms evidence on distribution by willingness to wait abstract this paper discusses a model of market clearing when prices are rigid the estimated model is one in which the waiting time necessary to obtain the scarce goods brings the excess demand in line with current supply in a manner of a flexible price the mechanism of such a market has been discussed by barzel and by nichols smolensky and tideman but little empirical evidence has been reported estimation of consumer demand in such a market is presented here heckman s approach to truncated sample estimation has been employed the approach allows modelling of time costs as a two part tariff the results confirm that consumer s response to waiting time is measurable and in the same order of magnitude as expected from response to changes in prices the study also indicates that rationing by willingness to wait does not necessarily distribute goods to the poor

on the coverage of public employment schemes for poverty alleviation abstract the cost effectiveness of public employment as a means of poverty alleviation depends on policy design choices concerning coverage and wage rates the choice is between schemes which aim for wide coverage at potentially low wages and schemes which ration participation so that more beneficiaries can escape poverty conditions are derived for ranking stylized policy alternatives in terms of a broad class of poverty measures the preferred policy is shown to depend on the budget level administrative cost the initial wage distribution and the policy maker s aversion to poverty empirical simulations for bangladesh data generally support wide coverage for distributionally sensitivity poverty measures but limited coverage for other measures

monetary policy in emerging markets can liability dollarization explain contractionary devaluations abstract in emerging markets external debt is denominated almost entirely in large developed country currencies such as the u s dollar this liability dollarization offers a channel through which exchange rate variation can lead to business cycle instability when firms assets are denominated in domestic currency and liabilities are denominated in foreign currency an exchange rate depreciation worsens firms balance sheets which leads to higher capital costs and contractions in capital spending to illustrate this i construct a quantitative sticky price small open economy model in which a monetary policy induced devaluation leads to a persistent contraction in output in this model fixed exchange rates offer greater stability than an interest rule that targets inflation

a management orientated approach to combination forecasting of tourism demand abstract volatility exponential smoothing regression and naive 2 models are considered singly and in combination in terms of forecasting demand for international tourism these models generate accurate predictions of tourism flows but their prime utility is when combined with other models usually models are combined by means of purely statistical criteria we show that goal programming gp offers an alternative flexible approach to model combination gp offers planners a practical solution to tourism forecasting problems since the method is more adaptable than conventional minimisation of prediction error by permitting practitioners to prioritise a series of management related goals forecasters can focus on longer and short term goals minimising forecast under and over estimation and or concentrate on prediction errors in tourism flows at various times of the year

the demand for tourism in north east england with special reference to northumbria an empirical analysis abstract this paper examines the trends of tourism in north east england in particular we focus on the area of northumbria to show the potential of tourism for economic development in the region within this analysis we concentrate on the demand for tourism in the region and in particular we are concerned with tourism by uk residents in northumbria domestic tourism the long run relationship between domestic tourism demand and a number of economic factors effecting this demand is considered using the johansen and juselius 1990 1992 multivariate cointegration analysis an error correction model is then proposed for short run forecasting of domestic demand for tourism in northumbria

monetary policy transmission interest rate rules and inflation targeting in three transition countries in 1991 the rate of inflation in the czech republic hungary and poland was between 35 and 70 at the end of 2001 it is below 8 we setup a small structural macro model of these economies to explain the process of disinflation contrary to a widespread skepticism which permeated a large part of previous research on these issues we show that a simple open macroeconomic model along the lines of svensson 2000 journal of international economics with forward looking inflation and exchange rate expectations can adequately characterize the relationship between the output gap inflation the real interest rate and the exchange rate during the course of transition we use the estimated models to interpret the main features of monetary policy in each country and identify the channels of policy transmission we characterize the policy rules and assess the relative importance of the interest rate channel on aggregate demand and the exchange rate channel which affects both aggregate demand and supply in determining the path of dis inflation in the same context we also tentatively analyze the consequences of attempting a faster path of disinflation finally we evaluate the appropriateness of the inflation targeting framework which has been adopted recently in all three countries and discuss to what extent it represents a discontinuity with the past

inflation targeting an indirect approach to assess the direct impact it is quite difficult to assess the benefits of inflation targeting it since its immediate effect will be on inflation expectations an unobserved variable due to lack of comprehensive data on inflation expectations most studies so far concentrated on the impact of it either on observable variables like output unemployment and inflation or compared post it surveys of itcountries with nonit countries in our study we focus on a yet unanswered question i e how the expectations change with the adoption of it we suggest that heterogeneous inflation expectations lead to long memory in actual inflation and it if successful should decrease this persistence by concentrating the public s expectations toward the announced target empirical results confirm our hypothesis with a reduction in inflation memory after the adoption of it in almost all eight developed countries in our sample

the structure of tourist expenditure in fiji evidence from unit root structural break tests the central aim of this paper is to investigate whether shocks to fiji s tourism industry have a permanent effect or a transitory effect on tourist expenditure in fiji to accomplish this aim the zivot and andrews 1992 one break test and the lumsdaine and papell 1997 two break tests are used the one break and two break tests reveal 1987 the year of the military coups in fiji as the year of the break moreover it is possible to reject the unit root null leading to the conclusion that shocks to fiji s tourism industry have a transitory effect on tourist expenditure in fiji

searching for a break in gnp it has been suggested that existing estimates of the long run impact of a surprise move in income may have a substantial upward bias due to the presence of a trend break in postwar u s gross national product data this article shows that the statistical evidence does not warrant abandoning the no trend break null hypothesis a key part of the argument is that conventionally computed p values overstate the likelihood of the trend break alternative hypothesis this is because they do not take into account that in practice the date is chosen based on pretest examination of the data

the impact of political instability on a fragile tourism product abstract the eastern mediterranean and aegean sea are not the first areas to find themselves engulfed in a political situation which threatens economies so reliant upon tourism and foreign currency receipts recent examples along the coast of north africa and former yugoslavia for instance show how foreign tourism can be all but obliterated by political instability and civil upheaval the on going dispute between the two partitioned communities on the island of cyprus threatens not only a tourism destination already suffering from increased competition and quality problems but also the neighbouring countries greece and turkey who rely upon tourism to contribute to their economies downturns in these economies can only exacerbate the problems in a vicious circle the reader is introduced to the more recent causes and the threats occurring in the area

investigating stationarity in tourist arrivals to taiwan using panel kpss with sharp drifts and smooth breaks in the study we applied panel based stationary test that incorporates sharp as well as smooth breaks to investigate the non stationarity of long run tourists arrivals to india from major tourists

the impact of natural culture and economic ideology on managerial work values a study of the united states russia japan and china this study assesses the impact of economic ideology and national culture on the individual work values of managers in the united states russia japan and china the convergence divergence crossvergence cdc framework was used as theoretical framework for the study while the schwartz value survey svs was used to operationalize over investigation of managerial work values across these four countries the findings largely support the crossvergence prospective while also confirming the role of national culture implications from the findings are drawn for the convergence divergence crossvergence of values as well as for the feasibility of multidomestic or global strategies for a corporate culture

terrorism and tourism as logical companions abstract the symbiotic relationship between terrorism and tourism needs to be understood and acted on not just in terms of security and marketing but in terms of such factors as planning site development employment policies political risk analysis and emergency management this article looks at the relationship between tourism and terrorism from several perspectives the political and economic impact of terrorism on tourism is assessed including the sensitivity of the tourism industry to general political strife and the vulnerability of travellers and tourist facilities to terroristic activity the nature of terroristic violence and the objectives of terrorist groups are evaluated to determine why and how attacks on tourists and facilities may fit the organizational and political objectives of terrorist groups finally the article suggests how the industry and policy makers must proceed to reduce the vulnerability for tourists and the travel sector

are shocks to tourism transitory at business cycle horizons the goal of this article is to propose a theoretical framework based on a macro model that can be used to examine the relative importance of permanent and transitory shocks in explaining variations in tourist expenditure and gross domestic product gdp at business cycle horizons we estimate the model for australia our findings reveal a common trend and common cycle relationship among tourist expenditure and gdp and the variance decomposition analysis of shocks reveals that at business cycle horizons permanent shocks explain the bulk of the variations in output while transitory shocks explain the bulk of the variations in tourist expenditure

inflation targeting genuine effects or publication selection bias abstract this paper uses a meta regression analysis mra to evaluate the impact of publication selection bias as for the macroeconomic effects of inflation targeting it a popular approach to implementing monetary policy documented in the existing literature using 8 059 point estimates from 113 studies we show that a significant part of the documented positive effects of it on inflation and to some extent output growth volatility is in fact due to publication selection bias in particular results pointing to lower inflation volatility and higher real gdp growth tend to be favored by researchers as well as those pointing to statistically significant macroeconomic effects however even after controlling for these two types of biases we find it to be correlated with lower inflation and higher real gdp growth differently the evidence on the it inflation volatility relationship is found to be less clear

does cultural background of tourists influence the destination choice an empirical study with special reference to political instability abstract political instability is a complex and multidimensional term with various conceptualisations and interpretations this paper investigates the cross cultural differences of the perceptions of travel agents concerning the impact of political instability on tourism to capture the impact a composite index of political instability indicators was developed and was subsequently distributed to 2000 travel agents in six major tourism generating countries an integrated empirical framework has been developed which allows the analysis of the survey data using repeated measures anova the results of the study demonstrates the existence of significant differences on the way that travel agents perceive the impact of the various types of political instability on the tourism industry the results might be of some interest to tourism policy makers and marketing agents

a seasonal analysis of asian tourist arrivals to australia rapid economic growth in south east and east asia has seen a surge in tourist arrivals from this region to australia in the 1990s prior to the currency crisis in late 1997 the purpose of the paper is to use autoregressive integrated moving average arima models to explain the nonstationary seasonally unadjusted quarterly tourist arrivals from hong kong and singapore to australia from 1975 1 to 1996 4 as the tourist arrivals series display strong seasonal patterns deterministic and stochastic seasonality are examined as possible explanations for variations in the international tourist arrivals series the hylleberg et al journal of econometrics 99 pp 215 38 1990 test for seasonal unit roots is used to examine stochastic seasonality in the various series

do or die strategic decision making following a shock event little attention has been directed towards investigating how senior managers and boards approach strategic decision making when dealing with shock events as compared to strategic decision making in a stable environment this paper presents evidence to suggest that strategic decision making following a shock event involves a more intuitive less analytical and less consultative approach while decision making in a stable environment is characterised by a more cooperative formal and analytical process decision making following a shock event tends to be simplified and fast whereas decision making in a stable environment tends to be comprehensive and slow furthermore the strategic role of the board transforms following a shock event from a limited involvement in strategy setting to a strong involvement in the setting of strategy this research has important management implications signifying that crisis management must increasingly focus on building an organisation s ability to reach swift decisions in crisis situations and avoid analysis paralysis

inflation targeting should it be modeled as an instrument rule or a targeting rule abstract the paper discusses how current inflation targeting should be modeled and argues that it is better represented as a commitment to a targeting rule a rule specifying operational objectives for monetary policy or a condition for the target variables than as a commitment to a simple instrument rule like a taylor rule

an integrative approach to tourism demand forecasting abstract tourism demand forecasting has become an end in itself with the forecasting process being divorced from the tourism management activities it is supposed to serve this article argues that a combination of techniques should be employed in order to facilitate a more meaningful dialogue between analysts and those responsible for tourism management decisions the emphasis placed on econometric modelling has the potential to create significant blind spots in our vision of the future the failure of this approach to enhance our understanding of phenomena which are more amenable to modes of analysis based on alternative paradigms such as chaos theory has contributed to mixed results in the past an approach to forecasting and strategic planning being developed by the australian tourist commission is used as a case study to illustrate aspects of the integrative approach that is advocated

international tourism and export instability export diversification has been suggested as a strategy for decreasing the level of export earnings instability which is experienced by many developing countries in recent years the international tourism sector has made an increasingly important contribution to the economies of many low income countries this article examines whether diversification into the non traditional tourism sector has succeeded in decreasing the instability of export earnings it was found that although tourism has the advantage of high growth rates and is a major source of foreign currency receipts earnings from international tourism did not bring about a significant decrease in the instability of export earnings of most of the developing and industrialised countries considered furthermore a net increase in the instability of earnings from tourism and merchandise exports occurred in a number of countries and may be a particular problem in small open developing economies

re evaluating the effectiveness of inflation targeting abstract this paper estimates the treatment effect of inflation targeting on macroeconomic variables using a semiparametric single index method by taking into account the model misspecification of parametric propensity scores our study uses a broader set of preconditions for inflation targeting and macroeconomic outcome variables than the existing literature the results suggest no significant difference in the inflation level and inflation volatility between targeters and non targeters after the adoption of inflation targeting we find that inflation targeting reduces sacrifice ratio and interest rate volatility in the developed economies and that it enhances fiscal discipline in both the industrial and developing countries

how dependent are the rural poor on the employment guarantee scheme in india an analysis of the icrisat data for two villages in the indian state of maharashtra points to mistargeting of the employment guarantee scheme egs there was a marked deterioration in it over the period 1979 89 reflected in not just a larger concentration of the more affluent among the egs participants but also their much larger gains from participating in this scheme nevertheless a large subset of the chronically poor depended heavily on egs as an additional source of income with significant welfare gains during 1979 84 but a large subset especially of relatively low income participants also withdrew from egs when overall economic conditions improved besides egs earnings varied consistently with economic conditions although the present analysis raises some concerns about the mistargeting of egs and in this context about the design and implementation of this scheme the presumption that such public support makes the poor perpetually dependent on it seems somewhat exaggerated if not mistaken

a comparison of three different approaches to tourist arrival forecasting abstract forecasting plays a major role in tourism planning the promotion of tourism projects involving substantial sums of money requires an estimate of future demand and market penetration the commitment to developing tourism would be much easier if it were possible to analyse current and past tourist traffic and predict the nature of changes in tourism demand these extrapolative approaches to forecasting require historical data this paper investigates the application of three time series forecasting techniques namely exponential smoothing univariate arima and elman s model of artificial neural networks ann to predict travel demand i e the number of arrivals from different countries to hong kong exponential smoothing and arima are two commonly used statistical time series forecasting techniques the third approach neural networks is an artificial intelligence technique derived from computer science according to the analysis presented in this paper neural networks seems to be the best method for forecasting visitor arrivals especially those series without obvious pattern

the forecasting of international expo tourism using quantitative and qualitative techniques this study predicts the number of visitors to an international tourism expo to be held in korea in 2012 an unprecedented event for the host city forecasting demand for such a mega event has received only limited attention in the literature unlike most studies forecasting international tourism demand forecasting expo demand involves using both quantitative forecasting models and qualitative technique because of data limitations combining quantitative techniques with willingness to visit wtv surveys predicts the expo demand at 8 9 million visitors in comparison using the delphi method experts predict expo demand at 6 8 million visitors for this study the delphi method provides more conservative estimates than estimates from combining quantitative techniques with wtv policy implications presented are directed toward expo planners and practitioners in terms of demand and supply side application of these results in the decision making process and future challenges surrounding demand forecasting

how accurate is food for work self targeting in the presence of imperfect factor markets evidence from ethiopia effective targeting of transfers is a key issue in public policy to combat poverty much faith is presently placed in self targeting mechanisms such as public employment schemes supported by food for work transfers where targeting errors have been observed these are usually attributed to mismanagement of key operational details such as the project s wage rate using a unique data set from rural ethiopia we demonstrate that targeting errors may also have structural causes in some low income countries we hypothesise that imperfect factor markets generate a predictable dispersion across households in reservation wage rates that breaks down the unconditionally positive relation between income and shadow wages on which the theory of self targeting public employment programmes rests our results confirm that the inaccuracy of ffw targeting stems from the fact that in rural ethiopia higher income households are endowed with more labour per unit of land or animal due to poor factor markets in land and liv

discontinuous losses from poverty generalized pα measures and optimal transfers to the poor abstract this paper examines the distributional properties of poverty measures which are discontinuous at the poverty line it is shown that among all the additive poverty measures only those measures with some discontinuous jump at the poverty line are such that it is optimal to allocate a given antipoverty budget either to the richest of the poor or to the poorest of the poor or to both a special class of such poverty measures is an extension of the well known p the properties of which are investigated

modelling the uncertainty in monthly international tourist arrivals to the maldives abstract the indian ocean tsunami of 26 december 2004 made clear the devastating short term impact in lost lives as well as the longer term impact in lost livelihoods and an uncertain future tourism was one of the more obvious non human casualties of this tragic natural phenomenon tourism is the principal industry in the maldives accounting for more than 30 of gdp and more than 60 of foreign exchange earnings as over 55 of government tax revenue arises from tourism related taxes and monthly government budget financing depends largely on international tourist arrivals the monitoring of daily weekly and monthly international tourist arrivals is essential for fiscal policy evaluation over 600 000 tourists visited the maldives in 2004 this paper examines the time series properties of monthly international tourist arrivals to the maldives from eight major tourist source countries namely italy germany uk japan france switzerland austria and the netherlands from 1 january 1994 to 31 december 2003 monthly international tourist arrivals and the associated uncertainty are estimated for the eight principal tourist source countries univariate and multivariate time series models of conditional volatility or uncertainty are estimated and tested the conditional correlations are estimated and examined to ascertain whether there is specialization diversification or segmentation in the international tourism demand shocks from the major tourism source countries to the maldives the estimated static conditional correlations for monthly international tourist arrivals as well as for the respective transformed series were found to be significantly different from zero but also relatively low this indicates that the government of the maldives and the major tour operators that organise tourist vacations have to emphasise their marketing efforts independently of each tourist source country

impact of financial economic crisis on demand for hotel rooms in hong kong abstract the main objectives of this study are 1 to identify the factors that influence the demand for hotel rooms in hong kong and 2 to generate quarterly forecasts of that demand to assess the impact of the ongoing financial economic crisis the demand for four types of hotel room from the residents of nine major origin countries is considered and forecasts are generated from the first quarter of 2009 to the fourth quarter of 2015 econometric approaches are employed to calculate the demand elasticities and their corresponding confidence intervals which are then used to generate interval demand predictions the empirical results reveal that the most important factors in determining the demand for hotel rooms in hong kong are the economic conditions measured by income level in the origin markets the price of the hotel rooms and the word of mouth effect demand for high tariff a and medium tariff hotel rooms is estimated to have experienced negative annual growth in 2009 due to the influence of the financial economic crisis whereas that for high tariff b hotel rooms is thought to have grown in 2009 after having decreased in 2008 the demand for tourist guesthouse rooms is expected to be the least affected by the crisis overall demand is predicted to recover gradually from 2010 onwards

tourism forecasting to combine or not to combine abstract existing non tourism related literature shows that forecast combination can improve forecasting accuracy this study tests this proposition in the tourism context by examining the efficiency of combining forecasts based on three different combination methods the data used for this study relate to tourist arrivals in hong kong from the top ten tourism generating countries regions the forecasts are derived from four different forecasting models autoregressive integrated moving average arima model autoregressive distributed lag model adlm error correction model ecm and vector autoregressive var model all forecasts are ex post and the empirical results show that the relative performance of combination versus single model forecasts varies according to the origin destination tourist flow under consideration which parallels previous findings regarding the relative performance of individual forecasting methods the results also vary with the combination techniques used furthermore although the combined forecasts do not always outperform the best single model forecasts almost all the combined forecasts are not outperformed by the worst single model forecasts this suggests that forecast combination can considerably reduce the risk of forecasting failure this conclusion also implies that combined forecasts are likely to be preferred to single model forecasts in many practical situations

war terror and the tourism market in israel a supply and demand model of the israeli hotel industry is developed distinguishing between its domestic and foreign sectors model simulations are employed to examine the impacts of war and terrorist incidents on tourist activity and hotel revenues foreign demand for israeli hotel stays is highly price elastic and income inelastic and moderately sensitive to terrorist events domestic demand is price inelastic income elastic and terror insensitive in the wake of terror attacks hotels supply or minimum prices to israeli tourists shift downward reducing local market prices and encouraging more local tourism however the magnitude of these shifts is minor and the local market thus provides little buffer for dropoffs in foreign tourism by permitting excess capacity in such fashion hotels respond rationally to the price inelasticity of local demand

on the measurement of poverty official statistics in the united states and the united kingdom show a rise in poverty between the 1970 s and the 1980 s but scepticism has been expressed with regard to these findings in particular the methods employed in the measurement of poverty have been the subject of criticism this paper re examines three basic issues in measuring poverty the choice of the poverty line the index of poverty and the relation between poverty and inequality one general theme running through the paper is that there is a diversity of judgments which enter the measurement of poverty and that it is necessary to recognize these explicitly in the procedures adopted there is likely to be disagreement about the choice of poverty line affecting both its level and its structure in this situation we may only be able to make comparisons and not to measure differences and the comparisons may lead only to a partial rather than a complete ordering the first section of the paper discusses the stochastic dominance conditions which allow such comparisons illustrating their application by reference to data for the united states the choice of poverty measure has been the subject of an extensive literature and a variety of measures have been proposed in the second section of the paper a different approach is suggested considering a class of measures satisfying certain general properties and seeking conditions under which all members of the class which includes many of those proposed give the same ranking those sceptical about measures of poverty often assert that poverty and inequality are being confounded the third section of the paper distinguishes four different viewpoints and relates them to theories of justice and views of social welfare

combining volatility and smoothing forecasts of uk demand for international tourism abstract univariate volatility models are applied to uk tourism demand to the country s most popular international destinations volatility is a concept borrowed from finance the fact that significant volatility models are found for ten of the twelve destinations examined shows that the volatility concept has relevance to tourism demand volatility models are able to quantify the impacts of positive and negative shocks on tourism demand the impacts of negative shocks vary in magnitude and duration according to the destination involved and the nature of the shock the forecasting capability of these models has never been assessed in the tourism field they are shown to generate highly accurate forecasts but become optimal when combined with forecasts obtained from exponential smoothing models two methods of combining individual forecasts are considered bias in individual volatility and smoothing models and in combinations of them is examined

forecasting tourist arrivals using origin country macroeconomics this study utilizes both disaggregated data and macroeconomic indicators in order to examine the importance of the macroeconomic environment of origin countries for analysing destinations tourist arrivals in particular it is the first study to present strong empirical evidence that both of these features in tandem provide statistically significant information of tourist arrivals in greece the forecasting exercises presented in our analysis show that macroeconomic indicators conducive to better forecasts are mainly origin country specific thus highlighting the importance of considering the apparent sharp national contrasts among origin countries when investigating domestic tourist arrivals given the extent of the dependency of the greek economy on tourism income but also given the perishable nature of the tourist product itself results have important implications for policy makers in greece