Business Confidence and Business Tourism in Japan

This study explored the asymmetric impact of business confidence index (BCI), real effective exchange rate, inflation, the value of trade index and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on inbound business tourism in Japan using the methodology of asymmetric cointegration. The paper uses the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) bounds test procedure to obtain the long-run cointegrating relationship. The estimated NARDL results show that in the long-run, the negative asymmetric impact of the BCI is stronger than the positive impact. Finally, the study confirms that for the long-run, asymmetric relation exists between tourism, BCI, real effective exchange rate, inflation, GDP and value of trade index.