CONFIDENCE INTERVALS FOR TOURISM DEMAND ELASTICITY

Abstract

Long-run tourism demand elasticities are important policy indicators for tourism product providers. Past tourism demand studies have mainly focused on the point estimates of demand elasticities. Although such estimates have some policymaking value, their information content is limited, as their associated sampling variability is unknown. Moreover, point estimates and their standard errors may be subject to small sample deficiencies, such as estimation biases and non-normality, which renders statistical inference for elasticity problematic. This paper presents a new statistical method called the bias-corrected bootstrap, which has been proved to provide accurate and reliable confidence intervals for demand elasticities. The method is herein employed to analyze the demand for Hong Kong tourism.