Political Upheavals, Tourism Flight, and Spillovers: The Case of the Arab Spring
利用2011年阿拉伯之春作为自然实验，研究发现政治动荡严重且持久地减少了外国游客需求，并产生了旅游转向世界其他地区和区域传染两种溢出效应，其中西方游客的转向和穆斯林邻国的传染效应更为显著。
This article exploits the Arab Spring, which occurred in 2011, as a natural experiment to study the effect of political upheavals on international travel. We find that foreign tourists’ demand to travel to countries experiencing Arab Spring episodes was sharply reduced and persisted after two years. We also find evidence of two different spillover effects: a tourism diversion to rest of the world, and a regional contagion to geographically nearby countries (other Arab countries that did not experience Arab Spring episodes and the Mediterranean region, although with heterogenous effects across individual countries). To disentangle how spillovers are channeled, we test whether geographical and cultural (Islamic) affinity play any role. We find that diversion is explained by the attitudes of Western tourists but not of those whose origin is Arabic. Furthermore, we find that the contagion caused by the Arab Spring is stronger for the nearest Muslim countries.