THE IMPACTS OF CULTURAL VALUES ON BILATERAL INTERNATIONAL TOURISM FLOWS

This study explores the impacts of cultural values on international tourism flows. A gravity model for bilateral tourism flows was tested with data involving 81 original countries and 32 destination countries. The external validity of the model was examined by testing several sub-models for each destination. The results show that international tourists tend to flow from lower power distance countries to higher power distance countries; countries with a higher level of individualism, a higher degree of masculinity, relaxed attitudes to new things, and pragmatic approaches tend to have more outbound and inbound travel. Among the control variables, distance has a strong negative impact, population and GDP per capita in original countries have strong positive impacts, population and GDP per capita in destination countries have moderat