Quantile Elasticity of International Tourism Demand for South Korea using Quantile Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model

This paper investigates international inbound tourism demand for South Korea and its determinants using quantile autoregressive model. In contrast to previous studies which dealt with only conditional mean, we examine effects of covariates at various conditional quantile levels; and therefore, more complete and interesting results are found. For inbound tourism demand, U.S. and Japanese tourism� demand are considered. For U.S. tourism demand, costs of living in Korea and competing destinations have moderate significant negative effects only at very high and low quantiles, while income does not have any significant effect to tourism demand. On the other hand, for Japanese tourism demand, income has significantly positive effects at lower quantiles, and living costs in Korea and competing destinations have significant negative effects at higher quantiles. These results address the heterogeneity in the tourism demand analysis.