Stronger together: International tourists “spillover” into close countries

Abstract

This paper explores the spillover effect of spatial proximity on international tourism in all 195 countries using data from the World Bank. We use a spatial proximity measure to calculate the number of neighbors that each country has and how the neighboring nations’ international tourist arrivals “unintentionally” affect each country’s international tourism. We define spatial proximity using both the conventional contiguity measure and the minimum-distance measure (MDM) of proximity: the two closest points between countries on their outer boundaries. By constructing spatial lag models (SLM) and spatial error models (SEM), we capture the spillover effects between neighbors. Our findings suggest that a country’s international tourism flows over the period of 1995–2019 are strongly influenced by international tourist arrivals to the nation’s neighboring countries; ranging from 8.1% to 45.8%, depending on the model used. Particularly, the spillover effect was more prominent for the period from 2015–2019, as compared to 1995–1999, implying increasing dependence among neighboring countries in international tourism, which directly contrasts the common assumption that technology is making geographic distance less relevant. This paper provides several important implications for both scholars and practitioners, although further study is required to determine the effects of historical interactions and spatial relations.