THE IMPACTS OF OIL PRICE SHOCKS ON TOURISM RECEIPTS FOR SELECTED MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA (MENA) COUNTRIES: DO STRUCTURAL BREAKS MATTER?

One of the short comings in the tourism literature is that research on the oil price-tourism receipts nexus is limited. However, the available studies, to the best of our knowledge, provide limited evidence on the negative effect of oil prices on tourism receipts. Nevertheless, the related literature did not consider the structural breaks in the analysis, which has proven to be important in the empirical work. As such, in this article we study the oil price-tourism receipts nexus for selected MENA countries in the presence of structural breaks. This is done by adopting the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test and incorporating the structural breaks. The findings show that the bounds test provides evidence of a long-run relationship between tourism receipts and oil prices after integrating structural breaks into the ARDL model for most countries.