Museum and monument attendance and tourism flow: a time series analysis approach

This article takes a time-series analysis approach to evaluate the directions of causality between tourism flows, on the one side, and museum and monument attendance, on the other. We consider Italy as a case study, and analyse monthly data over the period January 1996 to December 2010. All the considered series are seasonally integrated, and co-integration links emerge. We focus on the error-correction mechanism among co-integrated time series to detect the directional link(s) of causality. Clear-cut results emerge: bi-directional causality exists in the long-run dynamics, but it is the long-run dynamics of visits to museums and monuments that mainly adjust to tourism variables (arrivals, overnights, average stays). In the short run, there are some causal effects going from the cultural sites' attendance to tourism dynamics. The nonstationary nature of time series, their co-integration relationships and the direction of causal links suggest specific implications for tourism and cultural policies.