Resumen de Distance matters: an assessment of international tourism demand in Spain
José Manuel Ordóñez de Haro, María del Carmen Ordóñez de Haro, José Luis Torres Chacón
This article studies international tourist flows to Spain using data panel techniques. Most standard models only include income and relative cost of living as the main explanatory variables of the international tourism demand. By contrast, we show that geographic distance, interpreted as a proxy for the cross-sectional variation in travel cost among origin countries, is a very important variable in determining international tourism flows to Spain. The inclusion of this variable dramatically increases the explanatory power of the model and hardly changes the estimated value of income and price elasticities, which are consistent with those obtained in the literature.
