Examining the Relationship Between Tourism Index Return and Financial, Macroeconomic and Tourism Industry Development Indicators: An Application of MS-VAR Models

The tourism industry has flourished considerably over the years in Turkey and has competed with top international destinations. This study aims to identify the structural breaks specific to Turkey with a developing capital market and examine the causality relationship between tourism index return and financial, macroeconomic and tourism industry development indicators from January 2005 to February 2022. The MS-VAR econometric model based on two regimes detects nonlinear and asymmetrical structures in the dataset. Our findings indicate local effects of shocks on financial and macroeconomic indicators during regime transition periods. Furthermore, there are unidirectional causality relationships between real exchange rate, tourism index returns and the value of trading volume, but no relationship is found between tourism index return and other indicators, namely, bank loans granted to the tourism industry and tourist arrivals.