Tourism demand and tourism growth cycles in Portugal and Spain

• Autor(a) principal: Bento, João Paulo Cerdeira
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Pereira, Elisabeth Teixeira
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/38824
• topic: Tourism demand; Expansion; Contraction; Spectral analysis; Iberian peninsula

This paper investigates the patterns of tourism growth cycles in domestic and international tourism demand for Portugal and Spain with monthly data on visitor’s arrivals in tourist accommodation establishments from January 1990 to September 2013. The de-trending method proposed by Hodrick-Prescott filter is used to extract the tourism growth cycles for both resident and non-resident tourists. The Bry-Boschan algorithm finds that the duration of contractions tend to be on average twice longer for resident tourists than for non- -resident tourists, and the length of expansions is almost three times higher for non-resident tourists than for resident ones in Portugal. The duration of the tourism growth cycles is much higher in Portugal than in Spain in both groups of tourists by ten to twelve months. Large expansion phases in Portugal tend to coexist with large contraction phases in Spain along the cycles from non-resident tourists. Spectral analysis confirms the existence of one dominant cyclic frequency within tourism demand from both tourist groups. The paper is concluded with a brief discussion of findings.