CONVERGENCE ANALYSIS OF TURKEY'S TOURISM MARKET: EVIDENCE FROM FOURIER UNIT ROOT TESTS

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the convergence hypothesis regarding Turkey, one of the world's most important tourism destinations and a developing country, for international tourism markets, from the perspective of empirical validity. With this purpose, the study econometrically examines the validity of the convergence hypothesis for Turkey’s international tourism market, which makes up almost all of it, and 97 international tourism markets of various sizes located in different continents, in the context of time series analysis, using Fourier unit root tests, for the 1996:M1-2018:M12 period. As a result of the study, the convergence hypothesis was determined to be valid in empirical terms in 53 of the international tourism markets in Turkey and invalid in 44 of them. These results show that the tourism strategies implemented in Turkey's international tourism markets by policy makers are effective in 53 markets where convergence is taking place and relatively not effective in 44 of the markets where there is no convergence.