Tourism development and happiness: International evidence

Chien-Chiang Lee (), Mei-Ping Chen () and Yi-Ting Peng
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Yi-Ting Peng: Chaoyang University of Technology

Tourism Economics, 2021, vol. 27, issue 5, 1101-1136

Abstract: The existing tourism- and happiness-related literature commonly investigates whether a happy destination does in fact render tourists happy and how tourist arrivals affect residents’ happiness. This research thus first explores whether the host country and Twitter happiness indices influence tourism development in an international framework (i.e. tourist arrivals, tourism revenues, and travel and leisure sector returns). To account for intricate correlations among variables, the study employs a quantile regression approach on panel data from 119 countries spanning 2006–2017. Evidences find that most host country happiness indices and macroeconomic factors show salient, nonlinear, and asymmetric impacts across both tourist arrival and tourism revenue quantiles in concurrent and subsequent periods, except for European country results. Moreover, Twitter happiness index strongly affects travel and leisure sector returns, but has no impact on tourist arrivals as well as tourism revenues, implying the importance of social media happiness on said returns.

Keywords: host country happiness; quantile regression; tourism development; tourist arrivals; travel and leisure sector; Twitter happiness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:toueco:v:27:y:2021:i:5:p:1101-1136

DOI: 10.1177/1354816620921574

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