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Abstract

International tourism is on the one hand considered a necessity and on the other hand it is regarded as a reward. The number of tourist arrivals has been increasing since 1950’s, however there are not many changes to the list of tourist generating or tourist receiving countries. Turkey is one of the world’s most visited destinations, in the top ten, and as the number of outbound tourists has been increasing, factors affecting Turkish outbound travellers have been a new subject of study. Turkish outbound tourism demand has been growing since 2012, and the market size has reached 9.25 million outbound visitors. As the growth in the number of outbound tourists from Turkey is still immature and recent, the empirical studies are limited. In literature there are a few studies analysing the determinants of Turkish outbound tourism demand. Economic growth is mostly studied for inbound tourism in case tourism’s contribution to the economy by foreign exchange earnings is an important issue. There are some studies exploring the effects of income on outbound tourism demand, nevertheless there are none for Turkey. This study attempts to investigate the effects of economic growth (income) and exchange rates (price) on Turkish outbound tourism demand, using Kapetenious (2005) multiple structural breaks unit root test to incorporate the structural breaks in the series and Maki (2012) cointegration analysis to investigate the long term relations between dependent and independent variables. Quarterly data for the period 2004:1-2016:2 is used for the variables namely the number of Turkish citizens visiting abroad, real GDP and effective exchange rates for US Dollar and Euro. GDP is used as a proxy for economic growth and real income, and effective exchange rates are used as a proxy for the possible effects of relative prices. The results indicate that Turkish outbound tourism is positively affected by the real GDP in the long run. Exchange rates are found to be statistically insignificant. Possible reasons of the findings and policy implications are discussed in conclusion.