Terrorism and international air travel: A gravity approach

Abstract

We present a theoretical model (adapted from the structural gravity model by Anderson and van Wincoop, American Economic Review, 93, 2003, 170) to capture the effects of terrorism on air passenger traffic between nations affected by terrorism. We then use equations derived from this model, in conjunction with alternative functional forms for trade costs, to estimate the effects of terrorism on bilateral air passenger service flows from 58 source countries to 26 destination countries during 2000–14. An additional small‐scale terrorist incident in the origin country and destination country together results in a reduction in bilateral air passenger travel by, at least, 1.3% and 0.81%, respectively, for pairs of countries located 1,000 and 2,000 km or less apart. The adverse impact of transnational terrorism is approximately five times larger. Terrorism adversely impacts bilateral air passenger travel both by reducing national output and especially by increasing psychological distress. Last but not the least, international air passenger travel is found to be extremely sensitive to fatal terrorist attacks and terrorist attacks on targets such as airports, travel or tourists.

Geopolitical risk and tourism: Evidence from dynamic heterogeneous panel models

“…Tourists may, however, be willing to accept the risk if the destination is exceptional enough to entice them (Frey, Luechinger, & Stutzer, 2007;Lepp & Gibson, 2003). In the same vein, a number of papers have shown that the effect of political instability/terrorism on tourism may be non-linear; that is, it starts adversely impacting tourism after reaching a certain threshold (Harb & Bassil, 2019;Mitra, Pham, & Bandyopadhyay, 2018;Saha & Yap, 2014). Sharifpour, Walters, and Ritchie (2013) and Morakabati and Kapu sci nski (2016) opine that risk appetite varies across tourist groups, from allocentric to psychocentric, and is mainly determined by the personality traits of tourists and the uniqueness of the destination.…”

Fatal Attraction: How Security Threats Hurt Tourism

“…Seminal papers by Enders and Sandler (1991), Enders, Sandler, and Parise (1992), Pizam and Mansfeld (1996), Sönmez (1998), Sönmez and Graefe (1998), Bonham, Edmonds, and Mak (2006), or Araña and Leon (2008) explored the impact of terrorism on tourism flows. Moreover, this topic still attracts a great deal of attention in the tourism economic literature (Bassil, Saleh, and Anwar 2017; Samitasa et al 2018; Goldman and Neubauer-Shani 2016; Walters, Wallin, and Hartley 2018; Mitra, Pham, and Bandyopadhyay 2018). In general, they obtained that terrorism-related incidents cause a significant decline in tourists’ intentions to visit those affected destinations.…”

“…Using bilateral tourism data, Llorca-Vivero (2008) finds that terrorism seriously damages the tourism industry, with particularly severe effects in developing countries. Focusing on air passenger service flows, Mitra, Pham, and Bandyopadhyay (2018) obtained that terrorism adversely impacts international air passenger travel. Neumayer and Plümper (2016) analyze spatial spillover effects in international tourism as a consequence of terrorism and find that attacks affect tourist flows not only to the targeted country but also to similar destinations.…”

Terrorism and inbound tourism: Does immigration have a moderating effect?

“…In this case, tourists’ fear and their perception of risk will be aggravated leading to an unnecessary fall in tourist arrivals (Buigut and Amendah, 2016; Fletcher and Morakabati, 2008). Fourth, terrorism in a destination country reduces tourism flows via macroeconomic disruptions and its destructive effect on GDP (Mitra et al, 2018). Finally, terrorism can damage the image of a country, and frequent terrorist acts can alter the intentions of tourists to visit a destination (Alvarez and Campo, 2014; Fernando et al, 2013; Sönmez et al, 1999).…”