Prospects for Latin America and Caribbean Region in the Global Market for International Tourism: A Projection to the Year 2020

Abstract

International tourism has become very important to several developing countries as a major source of foreign exchange earnings for their economic development. This article explores the potentials of countries of the Latin America and Caribbean region in the global market for international tourism up to the end of the next decade. This was achieved by analyzing past trends of international tourism in the region, and projecting these trends to the year 2020 using a combination of four different time-series projection models evaluated by the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). Results show that international tourism arrivals into the Latin America and Caribbean region would increase from 51.21 million in 2004 (end of observed period) to between 87.58 million and 100.03 million by the year 2020.

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

“…Additionally, since the majority of the international tourism arrivals to the Caribbean and Latin America correspond to visitors from the United States (Oyewole 2009), it is plausible that in the early months of the outbreak the tourism industry in the region was uncertain about soon-to-come, relevant decisions yet to be made by the United States as the major outbound market. These included, for example, determinations by the U.S. State Department (e.g., passports issuance, travel warnings) (USNews 2020) and the airlines' resuming of previously cancelled flight routes (The New York Times 2020).…”