Autor/a

María Santana Gallego (Universidad de Las Islas Baleares)

Political turmoils generate negative consequences for economic development. In this
paper we provide evidence on how a great political shock, named `Arab Spring' (AS), occurred
in 2011, aects international tourists arrivals. We use a gravity model of tourism ows to
ascertain how much in ows of tourists from the rest of the world changed before and after the
political upheaval once we condition bilateral tourism demand to a wide range of observed
and unobserved shocks of dierent nature. We nd that foreign tourists reduced sharply
the demand of traveling to countries experiencing `Arab Spring' episodes and that the AS
magnied other extenuating shocks. We also nd evidence of two dierent spillover eects:
a contagion to other Arab countries that did not experience those episodes or that they did
it at a minor scale, and a substitution eect to other competitor countries. We also nd that
these results are not due to the rise of terrorism in those countries after the `Arab Spring'.
We quantify that tourism losses due to AS produced annual GDP drops ranging from 0.5 to
2.9 percent after the political shocks

Palabras clave: Gravity Model, Tourism, terrorism