Testing Convergence of Fijis Tourism Markets

Abstract

The convergence hypothesis for tourism markets is based on the tenet that when tourism markets are converging the difference between total international visitor arrivals to a country and international visitor arrivals from a particular country will be stationary. We argue that if this is true, then convergence can also be tested through examining whether total visitor arrivals and visitor arrivals from a particular market are co-integrated. We test the convergence hypothesis by examining visitor arrivals to Fiji from eight tourist source markets, using both unit root and co-integration tests. We find strong statistical evidence that Fijis tourism markets converge.