Statistical Analysis of Overseas Tourist Arrivals to South Africa in Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 on Sustainable Development

Musara Chipumuro, Delson Chikobvu and Tendai Makoni ()
Additional contact information
Musara Chipumuro: Department of Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein 9300, South Africa
Delson Chikobvu: Department of Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein 9300, South Africa
Tendai Makoni: Department of Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein 9300, South Africa

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 13, 1-17

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has harmed the global tourism and hospitality industry, crippling foreign currency earnings and employment in many countries, South Africa (SA) included. This study aims to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on overseas tourist arrivals to SA, and to make an inference on the country’s foreign currency earnings on economic development. The Box–Jenkins methodology is used in fitting non-seasonal integrated autoregressive moving average (ARIMA) and seasonal ARIMA (SARIMA) models to quantify and characterise the number of overseas tourists to SA. The ARIMA 1,0 , 1 ( 0,1 , 1 ) 12 model is the best fitting model for the overseas tourist arrivals data to SA, as confirmed by the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). The model shows good forecasting power in the absence of the COVID-19 pandemic, as evidenced by the validation results. The difference between forecasts and actual values after the validation phase shows the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on overseas tourist arrivals to SA and the challenges it poses to the statistical modelling of tourist arrivals to SA, considering the pandemic was the first of its kind. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the tourism industry’s vulnerability to economic shocks, showing the need for aggressive marketing strategies that may revamp the tourism sectors to levels previously expected before and or after COVID-19 for sustainable development.

Keywords: overseas tourist arrivals; South Africa; Box–Jenkins methodology; forecasting; COVID-19 pandemic; sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/13/5756/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/16/13/5756/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:16:y:2024:i:13:p:5756-:d:1429781

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().