O impacto da volatilidade da taxa de câmbio no fluxo turístico de Cabo Verde

Abstract

Since the 2000s tourism has been establishing itself as one of the main activities for the economic development of Cape Verde. Therefore, it is important to study the effect of usual variables on tourism; in particular, to analyze the effect of exchange rate volatility on the tourist flow of the country, based on the availability of quarterly data between 2007 and 2018. Three different measures of exchange rate volatility were analyzed. In addition to these measures, were included in the model the variable relative prices, measured by the ratio between the Cape Verde consumer price index and the rest of the world price index; the variable GDP per capita, measured in terms of purchasing power parity and weighted by the number of arrivals of tourists by country of origin, divided by the total number of tourists arriving in Cape Verde; as well as variables representing seasonal trend and seasonality. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL), we concluded that, in the case of Cape Verde, this variable behaves differently from the one usually described in the literature, because the exchange rate volatility presented a positive relation with the tourist flow, although not statistically significant, which can be explained by the composition of the markets that emit tourists to Cape Verde, mostly comprised of European countries that use the Euro currency, the currency to which the Cape Verdean Escudo is attached.