دانلود رایگان مقاله ارتباط گردشگری و صلح

Abstract

Tourism is often heralded as a force for peace, however, empirical research to confirm this suggestion is scant. To address this gap, this research integrates several datasets on conflict and tourism to examine whether a larger inflow of tourists makes civil conflict less likely. Several theoretical arguments of the role of tourism alongside other peace determining factors are presented. These inform the development of a probit model, and several specifications, that tests the hypothesis based on data from 126 countries and for the years from 1995 to 2010. The findings provide strong evidence that increasing tourism arrivals have a stabilising effect and increase the chance of peace. Implications for tourism and its role in the process of development are discussed.

Discussion and conclusions

This research integrated data on tourist arrivals with a global database on civil conflict to examine whether increased levels of arrivals reduce the likelihood of conflict. Theoretically, tourism can be grounds for peace or a beneficiary of peace and recent empirical evidence (Pratt & Liu, 2016) shows that the two effects co-exist. To isolate the direction of causality and identify the effect of tourism on peace, the econometric model was estimated using lagged values of tourism and other regressors. In addition, an exogenous source of variation in tourism was used to validate the findings. Results consistently indicated that larger tourism inflows reduce the probability of conflict. This finding was robust to various sensitivity checks, including the estimation of a dynamic model where the current risk of civil war depends on its past values. Thus, this research shows that the peace stabilising role of tourism is not just hypothetical.