Factors affecting the International tourism demand in Iran: ARDL approach

Iran is a country with great capacities which have hitherto not been properly used for tourism. One of the principles of tourism development is tourism demand. This study aims at examining the factors influencing the demand for international tourism in Iran. For this purpose, the number of incoming tourists has been used as dependent variable of international tourism demand. The effect of the real income per capita of the ten countries with the highest number of tourists to Iran, Consumer price index of goods and services in Iran, market exchange rate, degree of economic openness and the dummy variable of Islamic revolution and the war were estimated as the independent variables. Autoregressive Distributed Lag model (ARDL) was used for the estimation. Results indicated that the real income per capita, market exchange rate, and the degrees of economic openness variables had positive impact on the in-coming of tourists, while the consumer price index of goods and services in Iran and the dummy variable (revolution and war) proved a negative effect.