The world tourism exports cycle

Considering that tourism is an important industry on a global scale, this study analyses and compares the deviations cycles from the long-term trend of tourism exports for all regions of the world with the cycle of the European Union with 27 member states (EU27). In this context, the approach followed allows us to analyse and determine the synchronization between tourism exports cycles of various regions of interest. In parallel, lagged concordance indices of cycles are identifi ed which can play an important role in forecasting and used as an important tool to support decision making of public and private entities associated to the tourism industry. In methodological terms, this paper is based on work originally developed in the literature by Gouveia and Rodrigues (2005), who analyse the tourism demand cycle following the method proposed by Harding and Pagan (2001) and obtain evidence of a strong degree of synchronization between the economic and the tourism cycle. This paper is innovative in the approach used to investigate the relationship between tourism exports cycles and in the identifi cation of the trend and cycle components through the application of state-space methods and the Kalman fi lter (Kalman 1960, Kalman and Bucy, 1961)