World Heritage Sites and Tourism. A gravity model approach

Abstract

[eng] This study aims to explore the effects of cultural, natural, and mixed World Heritage Sites (WHS) on international tourism demand, with a particular focus on growing economies in Latin America and the Caribbean region for the period 1995 to 2021. The study identifies the impact of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) sites on tourism flows, an area that remained under-researched in the tourism economic literature. To that end, a gravity model for tourism demand is estimated by applying the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) method. This research aims to contribute to the literature on the relationship between tourism and heritage sites in the context of meaningful intercultural exchange and understanding between residents of local communities and international visitors. This exploratory research was motivated by the limited literature on the impacts of UNESCO heritage recognition on tourism in Latin American and Caribbean economies. In the empirical analysis, we proceeded in two stages. Firstly, we defined a gravity model with a different set of fixed effects to estimate the effect of World Heritage Sites (cultural, natural, and mixed) and Intangible Cultural Heritage on international tourism for a panel of all countries worldwide. Then, in the second stage, we examine their impact on flows to the Latin America and the Caribbean region. The results indicate that the impact of UNESCO recognition varies depending on the type of heritage sites. Analyzing heritage independently, our findings indicate that the effects of Cultural Heritage positively impact tourism flows worldwide but negatively in Latin American and Caribbean countries. However, Natural and Mixed Heritage represents a growth in tourism flow for both study groups. In the case of Intangible Cultural Heritage, our results show that they negatively influence tourism flows worldwide but positively in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Furthermore, our analysis shows that Intangible Cultural Heritage has a high potential to attract tourism to Latin America and the Caribbean countries, suggesting that the recognition of one Intangible Cultural Heritage increases the number of international visitors by 15.82%.