A longitudinal comparison of world GNP with US travel payments

De Economist, 1994

When exchange rates are used to compare the per capita incomes of different countries, two major problems emerge: the results are volatile and they are subject to bias. Volatility arises because exchange rates may be quite variable over time. There is bias in the sense that the poverty of poor nations is overstated. This results from the fact that exchange rates reflect only those goods that are traded internationally. Many goods, particularly services, are not traded internationally or only to a limited extent. Since services tend to be labor intensive, and since labor tends to be relatively cheap in poor countries, the result is that international comparisons based on exchange rates yield a picture that exaggerates the poverty of such countries.

Minerals …, 1998

Journal of Travel Research, 1976

This article examines what has happened to the cost of travel in the United States from 1970 to the present time. The Travel Price Index (TPI) developed by the U.S. Travel Data Center is utilized to examine the changes. Data are presented for individual travel expenditure components such as common carrier fares, food, hotel-motel rates, gasoline, and incidentals. The American travel industry is a composite of many industries, and as such is directly affected by conditions existing in the Nation's overall economy. In recent years, rapid inflation has become of critical concern in the U.S. and other industrialized countries, affecting prices of all types of goods and services purchased by the consumer, including travel. While accurate procedures exist for measuring changes in the costs of many goods and services purchased in this country, this has not been the case for travel until recently. The Travel Price Index (TPI) has been developed by the U.S. Travel Data Center to fill this need. It is designed to measure changes in the cost of various goods and services Americans purchase while traveling in this country. Monthly TPI figures, as well as a discussion of significant changes occurring in the various components of the Index, ,are published in the Data Center's newsletter, travel printout. Structure and Methodology-CPI The TPI is based on the U.S. Department of Labor's Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures monthly changes in the total price of a representative sample of goods and services purchased by the average wage earner or clerical worker in urban areas of the United States.

Since 1950 the number of international tourist arrivals has grown from 25 million to over 800 million in 2005.Today international tourism receipts account for a huge percentage of worldwide exports of goods and services, and reached US$735 billion in 2006.These statistics make tourism one of the most dynamic industries of the modern economy. Many Commonwealth members rank in the list of the world’s top emerging tourism destinations. The author investigates whether tourism actually represents a key determinant for economic growth in these countries.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the demand for tourist arrivals to the United States, using the panel cointegration technique. The study attempts to identify and measure the impact of the main determinants of inbound international tourism flows to the United States. The study uses annual data from 1986 to 2011 for tourist arrivals from 50 major countries of tourist origin. The specified model includes several country-specific determinants. The panel unit root tests indicate all the variables are integrated of order one. The panel cointegration tests show that all seven test statistics reject the null hypothesis of no cointegration at the 1% significance level, indicating that the five variables are cointegrated. The results suggest that tourism demand to the United States must be considered as a luxury good and is highly dependent on the evolution of relative prices and cost of travel between origin and destination country. The results also show that tourism demand is elas...