Carla Massidda

A SVECM Analysis of the Relationship between International Tourism Arrivals, GDP and Trade in Italy

This article provides an SVECM investigation of long-run, short-run and contemporaneous relationships across per capita international tourism arrivals (ar), real GDP (y), and total international commercial transactions (tr) for the Italian economy. We find that variables span a bidimensional cointegrating space, which we normalize as long-run relationships between y and ar and between ar and tr. Signs and magnitudes of the estimated elasticities are as expected and compare well with the literature. The causation mechanism shows that none of the variables are weakly exogenous. What we find is that, whereas there appears to be unidirectional long-run causality running from y to tr and from tr to ar, bidirectional causality is detected between y and ar. Structural estimation and a study of the Impulse-Response functions of “meaningful” shocks hitting the economy are used to provide valuable insights for policy and business strategy design.

Migration and inbound tourism: an Italian perspective

This paper investigates the impact of migration on Italian inbound tourism flows in a dynamic panel data framework. Arrivals, expenditure and nights from 65 countries are analysed for the period 2005–2011. The migration variable is defined at both origin and destination in order to assess the pushing and pulling forces. Estimates were performed using both aggregated flows and flows disaggregated to separate the visiting friends and relatives (VFRs) from two non-VFR categories, namely holiday and business. The results suggest the presence of a strong migration-tourism nexus, which clearly goes beyond VFRs. Moreover, the effects of the different determinants vary according to the way in which the tourism market is segmented and, within each segment, to the way in which tourism demand is measured.

Does Internal Migration Affect Italian Domestic Tourism? A Panel Data Analysis

The authors propose a dynamic panel data investigation into the role of interregional migration in Italian domestic tourism demand, using three panel estimators characterized by different homogeneity assumptions imposed on the parameters. A standard cointegration analysis is performed before proceeding to panel regressions. The results provide ample support for a strong positive relationship between per capita domestic tourism nights and per capita internal migration stock. This evidence extends the migration—tourism nexus, already established at the international level, to the intra-national scale and reinforces the idea that host regions should not overlook the role of migration when designing their tourism policies.

The relationship between immigration and tourism firms

This article investigates whether the presence of immigrants represents an opportunity for Italian tourism firms to increase the number of establishments and their employees. To this scope, we focus on the hotels and restaurants sector where a great amount of revenues comes from the tourist expenditure. The investigation is conducted at both the nationwide level and, separately, for Centre-Northern and Southern provinces. As estimation technique, in order to deal with the potential endogeneity problem, we will proceed with the two-stage least square method. The results strongly support a positive relationship between the provincial share of immigrants and the number of tourism establishments and their employees. This relationship seems to be stronger for southern provinces.

Estimating the New Keynesian Phillips Curve for Italian Manufacturing Sectors

The purpose of this paper is to test the general validity of the NKPC previsions for the Italian manufacturing industries. In particular we are interested in estimating the extent to which the degree of nominal inertia and the fraction of backward-looking price-setters differ from industry to industry. We attempt to address this issue by testing three different model specifications: a pure forward-looking model versus a hybrid model where an income labour share marginal cost measure is considered, and a modified hybrid model specification where marginal costs are corrected to include intermediate inputs. Our results show that the backward-looking component is statistically significant and quantitatively large for all industries. Moreover, this estimate does not depend on the model’s specification. Conversely, the parameter measuring the extent of price rigidity is sensitive to the definition of firms’ cost. Interpreting the overall results, we conclude that price-setting behaviour is not totally homogeneous among Italian firms.