María Soledad Otero-Giráldez

Research Note: Estimating Price and Income Demand Elasticities for Spain Separately by the Major Source Markets

The main goal of this study is to estimate the price and income elasticity of demand for tourism to Spain. This estimation is done separately for the major international source markets for Spain: Germany, the UK, Italy and the Netherlands. For this purpose, the authors use the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration and the bootstrap method to construct empirical confidence intervals for each estimate. The results reveal that the tourism demand in all the countries studied has a similar income elasticity, which is approximately unitary. However, there is an important difference with regard to price elasticity: tourism demand from the UK is statistically price inelastic, but demand is elastic for the remaining countries. This finding is relevant because, first, it underlines the importance of studying the source markets separately instead of analysing an aggregate international tourism demand, and, second, it supports the need to implement different tourism policies and strategies with respect to the pricing decisions for each source market.

Detecting the socioeconomic driving forces of the fire catastrophe in NW Spain

Wildfires cause devastating environmental, social and economic effects in different regions of the world. The aim of this study was to analyze the long-run relationship between the number of ignition events and socioeconomic variables using time series data. We focus on Galicia, a region in the northwest part of the Iberian Peninsula and with one of the highest fire density and largest burned areas in Europe. Since the late 1980s, the number of forest fires has increased in Galicia and caused extensive damage to the environment, property and human life. The analysis is based on cointegration tests between variables. In order to avoid the problems related to spurious regression, the ARDL bounds testing approach was applied. The statistical evidence allows us to conclude that in the long term, the price of eucalyptus timber, the population in the primary sector and the intensity of the elections are relevant factors in explaining the start of forest fires. These three variables are found to increase the propensity of the population to start a fire that cause devastating environmental, social and economic effects.

Estimating the economic impact of a political conflict on tourism: The case of the Catalan separatist challenge

As an industry, tourism tends to be extremely responsive and vulnerable to political instabilities. Recently, a political conflict occurred in Spain, a leader in international tourism. In October 2017, the regional parliament of Catalonia asserted its independence from Spain, engendering a negative impact on the tourism sector of Catalonia. The main goal of our study is to assess the economic impact of the Catalan separatist challenge on the region’s tourism sector during the last quarter of 2017. To this end, we conducted a counterfactual analysis, based on forecasts generated by a seasonal autoregressive moving average model and an artificial neural network. The forecasts allowed us to calculate the projected number of international and domestic tourist visitors that would have travelled to Catalonia, had the separatist challenge not occurred. According to our results, the Catalan tourist sector effectively forfeited close to €200 million in revenue from the international tourism market, and around €27 million in revenue from the domestic market. These amounts differ from the economic gains attained by the other Spanish Mediterranean regions that compete with Catalonia to attract tourists.

Estimating the effects of regional political climate on Russian tourists to Spain

Regional political climate has become an increasingly significant force influencing travel behaviour in many tourist destinations. This paper attempts to address impacts of regional political stability on Russian inbound tourism into Spain within a demand model framework and using a cointegration approach. The results show that visa openness as well as political instability and civil unrest in substitute destinations attract more Russian tourists, boosting economic growth and reducing unemployment rates in Spain. On the contrary, international political confrontation results in disadvantage to Russian tourism demand to Spain.