Does exchange rate affect the foreign tourist arrivals? Evidence in an emerging tourist market

The rate of foreign tourist arrivals coming to Vietnam as an emerging tourism market has been increased significantly bringing enormous benefits for improving the socio-economic indicators. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of exchange rate policy on the number of foreign tourist arrivals in Vietnam over the period 2006-2018. Our regression results show the exchange rate maintained a positive impact on the demand of foreign tourists and indicate that the domestic currency devaluation also had a positive effect on the number of foreign tourists to Vietnam. Besides, the quantitative result also indicates the number of foreign tourist arrival in the early periods had a positive impact on itself in the current period. Furthermore, the Granger causality test con-firms the existence of a one-way causal relationship between the exchange rate and the number of foreign tourist arrivals. Finally, the paper provides some implications for policymakers in order to efficiently use the exchange rate policy to increase the number of foreign tourist arrivals in the coming time