Does the Crisis Information Search Tell the Impact of Disease on International Tourism Demand?

Abstract

As the world is struggling with the coronavirus (COVID-19), it is an important research task to understand the negative impact of the disease on the tourism industry with similar examples from the past and to prepare countermeasures for it. This study examines the effects of tourist attention to Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) on international tourism demand for South Korea during 2009– 2016. Search volume indices for MERS in Google and Baidu were employed as a proxy for the tourist attention paid to MERS. Using a structural vector autoregression model with block exogeneity restrictions, we set up tourist attention to MERS as an exogenous variable and control for endogeneity between macroeconomic variables and tourist arrivals. Our results show that the tourist attention paid to MERS has detrimental effects on tourist arrivals and its effects are heterogeneous across visitor countries. While the negative effects of tourist attention to MERS on U.S. and European tourist arrivals were moderate, this negative information effect was more pronounced when the countries of visitors are closer to Korea, such as Japan and China. Future research directions and limitations of the study was discussed at the end of the study.