An Econometric Analysis of Touristic Flows

Abstract

The tourism industry has grown rapidly in the last few decades, becoming one of the main economic activity for the greatest part of countries. The aim of this thesis is to analyze and forecast tourist flows among 24 countries, creating a network where the vertices represent the nations and the weights of the directed edges between vertices represent the tourist flow between pairs of countries. The network is made dynamic since the observations collected are monthly, allowing me to assess the intra-annual and long-period changes of network structure. The network dynamics is forecasted by means of structural time series analysis which allows for non-stationary components such as trend and seasonality that are strongly present in touristic data. In the last chapter is made an analysis of the mobility restrictions due to Covid-19 case, trying to forecast the impact of the restriction on the future touristic flows.