Thailand’s International Tourism Demand: The ARDL Approach to Cointegration

This paper sought to find the short-run and long-run relationships between international tourist arrivals in Thailand and economic variables such as GDP, the price of goods and services, transportation costs, temperature of Thailand and both the exchange rate and exchange rate risk for the period from 1997(Q1)-2005(Q2). The cointegration techniques used were based on the ARDL approach to cointegration (developed by Pesaran and Pesaran (1997), Pesaran and Smith (1999) and Pesaran et al. (2001)) of Thailand’s international tourism demand and error correction mechanisms were used to find the short-run relationships of Thailand’s international tourism demand. This paper used the full six standard method test for unit root tests such as ADF-Test (1979), PP-Test (1997, 1999), KPSS-Test (1992), DF-GLS Test (1996), the ERS Point Optimal Test and Ng and Perron (2001). The full six standard method test for unit root test have not previously been used to test unit roots for estimating tourism demand models based on ARDL approach to cointegration as well as this method for analyzing the long-run relations when the variables are of mixed-order of integration, i.e., I(0) and I(1). The long-run results indicate that growth in income (GDP) of Thailand’s major tourist source markets has a positive impact on international visitor arrivals to Thailand while transportation cost and both exchange rate and exchange rate risk have a negative impact on international visitor arrivals to Thailand. The findings were consistent with economic theory and the implications of the model can be used for policy making. Finally, the temperature of Thailand mostly has a negative impact on international visitor arrivals to Thailand.