The Study on the Impact of Tourism Prices on International Tourism Demand: The Case of Chinese Inbound Tourism from 15 Tourist Markets

The study aims to quantitatively examine how tourism prices affect tourism demand using data of tourists travelling to China from 17 country origins.Based on quarterly data from 1996 to 2016, we employ econometric approaches to investigate how economic and noneconomic factors, including real GDP per capita, income, tourism prices, transportation costs, economy openness and exogenous adverse events, relate to tourism demand.In particular, to study the effect of tourism price on tourism demand for China, we construct six different price variables in our empirical analysis.The results indicate that relative price standardized by exchange rate is the best proxy for tourism price, while transportation cost is not statistically significant.We also find that external shocks caused by medical disease and financial crisis have a significant impact on the demand for Chinese international tourism.