Effects of COVID-19 on Variations of Taxpayers in Tourism-Reliant Regions: The Case of the Mexican Caribbean

Abstract

Given the tourism industry’s risk and vulnerability to pandemics and the need to better understand the impacts on tourism destinations, this research assesses the effect of the COVID-19 outbreak on the variation of taxpayer units in the Mexican Caribbean region, which includes some of the major sun-and-sand beach destinations in Latin America. Using monthly data of registered taxpayer entities at the state and national levels as the analysis variable, probability distributions and definite integrals are employed to determine variations of the year following the lockdown, compared with previous years’ data. Results indicate that despite the government’s measures to restrict businesses’ operations and a reduction in tourism activities, registered taxpayers at the regional level did not decrease for most of 2020. Further, as business activities and tourism recovered, taxpayer units increased at the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021. Surprisingly, such a pattern was not observed at the national level, which yielded no statistically significant variations. A discussion of factors influencing the resilience of the tourism region in the study (e.g., outbound markets’ geographic proximity, absence of travel restrictions, closure of competing destinations) and implications for public finances are presented.

Loyalty in the time of COVID-19: A review of the literature in tourism destination settings

“…This is suggested by the large variance explained in the loyalty outcomes reported for highly populated countries with significant domestic markets such as China ( Han et al, 2021 ), India ( Rather, 2021 ), or some in the European area ( Papadopoulou et al, 2022 ) that are typically strong outbound tourism countries. For instance, the border closures in some countries produced an inflow of foreign travelers to other destinations with little restrictive health controls, as was the case of the Mexican Caribbean region in which returning visitors became a decisive factor to keep economic and business activity during the pandemic ( Cruz-Milán and Lagunas-Puls, 2021 ). In this respect, sanitary-related policies established by authorities along with travelers’ cautionary measures seem to give way to emerging models of behavior conditioned by pandemic threats, requiring research programs to better understand how tourist segments and their loyalty towards destination may be altered ( Zenker and Kock, 2020 ; Miao et al, 2021 ).…”

Paxlovid: Mechanism of Action, Synthesis, and In Silico Study

“…Since the 19 th century, one of the great threats to public health and safety is the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) [ 1 , 2 ].Until December 12, 2021, over 269 million cases and 5.3 million deaths have been demonstrated, making the COVID-19 pandemic [ 3 ]. Nirmatrelvir is a novel antiviral drug developed by Pfizer [ 4 ].…”