ARE SHOCKS TO TOURIST ARRIVALS IN MOROCCO PERMANENT OR TEMPORARY?

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to examine whether shocks had a permanent or temporary effect on international tourist arrivals in Morocco for its top 8 source countries. For this purpose, we apply the Harvey, Leybourne and Xiao (2008) linearity test and the linear tests and non-linear unit root (Elliott, Rothenberg, & Stock, 1996; Hepsag, 2019; Kruse, 2011; Lee & Strazicich, 2004). The results show that the series with linear characteristics are tourist arrivals from UK and USA and those with non-linear characteristics are tourist arrivals from Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Germany. The unit root tests reject the null hypothesis of a non-stationarity in tourist arrivals from all countries except the Germany. The implication of these findings is that the shocks had a temporary effect on tourism arrivals from 7 markets to Morocco. Therefore, Morocco's tourism sector is a sustainable industry as external shocks have not had long term disruption in the flow of tourist arrivals.