Description
Considering that tourism is an important industry on a global scale, this study analyses
and compares the deviations cycles from the long-term trend of tourism exports for
all regions of the world with the cycle of the European Union with 27 member states
(EU27). In this context, the approach followed allows us to analyse and determine
the synchronization between tourism exports cycles of various regions of interest.
In parallel, lagged concordance indices of cycles are identifi ed which can play an
important role in forecasting and used as an important tool to support decision making
of public and private entities associated to the tourism industry. In methodological
terms, this paper is based on work originally developed in the literature by Gouveia
and Rodrigues (2005), who analyse the tourism demand cycle following the method
proposed by Harding and Pagan (2001) and obtain evidence of a strong degree of
synchronization between the economic and the tourism cycle. This paper is innovative
in the approach used to investigate the relationship between tourism exports cycles
and in the identifi cation of the trend and cycle components through the application
of state-space methods and the Kalman fi lter (Kalman 1960, Kalman and Bucy, 1961).