Exchange Rate Volatility and Tourism Demand in India: Unraveling the Asymmetric Relationship

Abstract

This study explores the asymmetric effect of exchange rate volatility on tourism demand in India from January 2006 to April 2018. Tourism demand is captured from a twin perspective—quantity and value. While quantity is represented by foreign tourist arrival in India, earnings from foreign tourists are used to represent value. The study is unique from a methodological point of view as it makes the first ever application of the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model of Shin, Yu, and Greenwood-Nimmo (2014), in the tourism demand literature to capture nonlinearity simultaneously in the short- as well as long-run. Results of our analysis show that tourism demand in India responds asymmetrically to both nominal and real exchange rate volatility. Also, the long-run effects of exchange rate uncertainty are shown to be more damaging than the short-run effects. Our findings are fairly robust to alternative specifications.