The World Is Flatter? Examining the Relationship between Cultural Distance and International Tourist Flows

Abstract

Geographic distance has been studied extensively as an obstructer of tourism flows, whereas another distance measure, cultural distance (CD), receives less attention in tourism demand research. Using international tourist arrival data between 94 countries for the period 1995–2012, we estimate several Poisson gravity models incorporating a CD measure based on national cultural scores from the World Values Survey (WVS). Our estimation results show a negative and significant effect of CD on international tourist flows, the elasticity of which is –0.158, and the effect appears significantly smaller between countries with historical colonial linkage. Most notably, the tourism-inhibiting effect of CD began a downward trend in 2003. In particular, we find that economic globalization and technology advancement can be used to explain the declining effect of CD. Major conclusions are substantiated in a robustness check using two alternative CD measures.

Does Culture Affect Tourism Demand? A Global Perspective

“…Yang and Wong (2012) identified that the cultural distance is statistically negatively related to inbound tourism to China using a panel data gravity model. This negative relationship was further confirmed by Yang et al (2018) in a global setting. Some scholars argue that modelling cultural distance and tourism demand manifests as a statistically significant U-shaped relationship (Bi & Lehto, 2018; Esiyok et al, 2017; Zhang et al, 2017).…”

“…V l allocates higher weights to the dimensions with smaller variance and therefore ensures that a specific dimension will not be overweighted because of bigger variance. Benefited from this feature, Mahalanobis distance is a robust measurement and has been widely used in tourism studies (Kogut & Singh, 1988;Ng et al, 2007;Yang et al, 2016Yang et al, , 2018. The use of Mahalanobis distance in aggregating different dimensions of the HNCD index can also be found in Yang and Wong (2012) and Yang et al (2016).…”

“…In addition, analyses are conducted by applying the model across years and subgroups/market segments. Distinguished from panel data analysis in other related studies (e.g., Yang et al, 2018; Zhang et al, 2017), the cross-sectional analysis conducted across different years provides insights to the time varying relationship between tourism demand and cultural distance. Similarly, the analysis of subgroups/markets segments illustrates the regional heterogeneities in the sample.…”

“…In their national statistic reports, 44 of the 72 destinations record country of residence in accounting visitor arrivals, while the rest of the destinations use nationality. Yang et al (2018) showed that different definitions of tourist flows do not have significant impact on measures of tourism demand. Thus, in this study, data with different scopes are incorporated to achieve a larger sample size and to enhance the generality of the findings.…”

“…These are difficult to generalise to other source markets or destinations. Two recent studies (Yang et al, 2018; Zhang et al, 2017) address this issue by using panel data models. However, the potential heterogeneity of cultural distance’s effect on tourism demand across time and market segments requires further study.…”