THE FOOD IMPORT - INTERNATIONAL TOURISM NEXUS IN CROATIA: AN APPLICATION OF THE ARLD AND NARDL APPROACH AND CAUSALITY

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between food import dependency and the international tourist arrivals in Croatia during the period spanning 1969-2018. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the above hypothesis by detecting the causality between foods imports represented as various food products and international tourism arrivals, that suit as a proxy for tourism consumption. The study method was able to capture symmetries in the relationship between some food import products and tourism, known as autoregressive-distributed lags, but not for all imported food items designed for this study. Since an asymmetric analysis, in such cases, requires the use of nonlinear models, we use nonlinear models and find evidence of asymmetric cointegration. For almost two decades before the global COVID-19 crisis, we conclude, Croatia's food imports grew rapidly, and these imports appear to be mainly driven by exports of services linked to pervasive tourism expansion.