Supervisors info:
Ευάγγελος Βασιλείου, Καθηγητής,Τμήμα Μηχανικών Οικονομίας και Διοίκησης ,Πανεπιστημίο Αιγαίου
Summary:
The present master thesis aims to investigate the causes that affect the international tourism demand of Greece. The analysis is based on a panel data from 34 countries, which refers to the 91.5% of total tourism demand in Greece over the period 2000-2015, in order to include the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent debt crisis to export more secure conclusions. Tourism demand is estimated using static and dynamic equations that take the number of arrivals of tourists from their countries of origin as a dependent variable. The explanatory variables used to explain the demand function are quantitative and are mainly economic and demographic. Regarding the estimation of regression coefficients, statistical methods have been used to take account of the complexity of panel data. The OLS, FE, RE and GMM-SYS methods were followed using the Stata / SE 12 statistical package.
This study differs from previous empirical studies in the analysis of Greece's international tourism demand as it uses a very large set of data that includes most of the countries of origin of tourists and uses additional explanatory variables. More specifically, this thesis consists of the theoretical and empirical parts and has the following form:
In the first chapter, we present the various definitions that have been given for the concept of tourism according to the international literature and additionally, the official definitions of the concepts of "tourism" and "tourist" that have been formulated by the World Tourism Organization (WTO) are given. Finally, the concept of tourism is described as an economic activity, the course of international tourism and its contribution to the Greek economy. In the second chapter, determinants of tourism demand and its characteristics are mentioned. Moreover, in the third chapter there is an extensive literature review of previous studies in the context of analysis of the international tourism demand. In particular, we present the main models (chronological, econometric and artificial intelligence), estimation methods, dependent and independent variables and error metrics as well.
In the fourth chapter, empirical analysis of the tourism demand of Greece is carried out using static and dynamic data panels. Then, through necessary statistical tests, an effort is made to select a suitable econometric model that better explains the data. Finally, the conclusions that are deducted from this analysis are presented.
Keywords:
Panel Data, Tourism Demand in Greece, Dynamic Model, Generalized Method of Moments-Systems
