The pernicious impact of visa restrictions on inbound tourism: the case of Turkey

Abstract

Visa policies have been important instruments of control for the movement of people and what they effectuate depends on their character. They impede the flow of people when they are restrictive; they facilitate the entry and admission of people when they are liberal. Turkey has been using visa policies liberally for long to stimulate tourism growth. In this paper, the log-linearized version of gravity-type models is used to analyze Turkey's tourism demand relating inbound travel to visa requirements, macroeconomic variables, distance and regional contiguity. The countries are segmented into clusters according to travel freedom their citizens enjoy using the Henley & Partners Visa Restrictions Index by employing the two-step cluster analysis. It is found that the visa restrictions imposed on a country has a detrimental impact of 29 percent on average on inward mobility and this impact is on the higher side for countries with almost visa-free travel.