Dyadic hostility, tourism, and regional trade agreements

This study uses a gravity approach to investigate the effect of dyadic hostility levels on bilateral tourism flows and determine whether regional trade agreements (RTAs) attenuate the link between dyadic hostility levels and tourism flows. We used a balanced panel dataset of 189 destination countries, 200 origin countries, and 16,059 country-pairs from 2005 through 2015. The results show that while low-level dyadic hostility suppresses international tourism flows, its effect is often weak or statistically insignificant. However, the analysis shows strong evidence that high-level dyadic hostility dampens tourism flows across a range of model specifications. Furthermore, the results indicate that RTA membership helps to reverse the negative effect of both low and high levels of dyadic hostility on tourism flows.