 Travel Channel Meets Discovery Channel or How Tourism Can Encourage Better Export Performance and Diversification in NepalJose Guilherme Reis and Gonzalo Varela South Asia Economic Journal, 2015, vol. 16, issue 2, 183-208 Abstract: Entering and surviving in export markets is a costly process that involves learning about the existence of foreign demand, ‘discovering’ production costs, building up reputation, succeeding in product branding to reduce competitive pressures and to upgrade quality to serve demanding international clients, and remaining competitive in the marketplace. This article argues that tourism alleviates some of these costs by providing an inexpensive platform for cost discovery and by acting as an accessible ‘in-house’ trade fair for domestic producers. It combines product-level data on world and Nepal’s exports with Nepalese data on tourist inflows, and macro-indicators on relative prices. For tourism-related goods, it reveals a positive association between tourist inflows from given destinations with future merchandise exports to those destinations, while no association is found for goods unrelated to tourism. The results suggest spillovers from tourism into merchandise export performance and diversification and gains from cooperation between tourism and export promotion. Keywords: export performance; diversification; panel data; trade fairs (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:soueco:v:16:y:2015:i:2:p:183-208 Access Statistics for this article More articles in South Asia Economic Journal from Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.