The synergistic effect of natural disaster frequency and severity on inbound tourist flows from the annual perspective
Introduction
The tourism industry has become more vulnerable (Rosselló, Becken, & Santana-Gallego, 2020) owing to the growing frequency of natural disasters (Becken, Mahon, Rennie, & Shakeela, 2014; Chiou, Huang, Tsai, Lin, & Yu, 2013). In 2019 alone, at least 396 mass natural disasters killing 11,755 people and resulting in 95 million victims and nearly US$130 billion in economic losses were reported around the world (Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters [CRED], 2020). Many famous destination countries, such as Japan, the United States, Thailand, and China, suffer from frequent natural disasters. For example, in 2019, the United States of America had 20 mass disasters, and Japan had 10 mass disasters, as reported by CRED. This was not a special phenomenon that only occurred in 2019. According to CRED (2020), there are more than 300 mass natural disasters on average in the world every year with many destination countries suffering multiple natural disasters a year (see Table 1). However, to date, the existing literature has overlooked the frequency of natural disasters, and studies that investigate the effects of disaster frequency on inbound tourist arrivals from an annual perspective are scarce.
The impacts of destination natural disasters on tourism can be studied from the tourist perspective (Dowling & Staelin, 1994; Roehl & Fesenmaier, 1992; Walters, Mair, & Ritchie, 2015) and destination perspective (Ghimire, 2015; Tsai & Chen, 2011; Woosnam & Kim, 2014). From the perspective of destination management, the reality is that multiple natural disasters may hit the same destination country in the same year, which has been emphasized by Rosselló et al. (2020). Therefore, to respond to multiple natural disasters, destination countries should not only focus on a single natural disaster, but they should also pay close attention to the accumulative impact of multiple natural disasters on inbound tourist flows. Regarding this point, the severity and frequency of natural disasters may be two important attributes that can be used to measure accumulative natural disasters. However, few studies have explored the impacts of these two attributes on inbound tourist flows simultaneously. The existing literature mainly focuses on the effect of the severity of a single natural disaster (Okumus, Altinay, & Arasli, 2005; Reddy, 2005; Yang, Wang, & Chen, 2011), and the impact of the accumulative severity of natural disasters in the same year has not received sufficient investigation. Therefore, to achieve the sustainable development of inbound tourism for destinations and to expand the current knowledge on the impacts of the attributes of natural disasters (Orchiston, 2012; Shakeela & Becken, 2015), this study explores the synergistic effect of the frequency and severity of natural disasters on inbound tourist flows from the annual perspective.
The existing literature mainly concentrates on the impacts of the single widely known natural disasters, such as the Nepal earthquakes (Ghimire, 2015), the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic (Min, Lim, & Kung, 2010), or COVID-19 (Gössling, Scott, & Hall, 2020). Natural disasters have mainly been investigated about the relationship between their severity and the damage they cause to the tourism industry (Floyd, Gibson, Pennington-Gray, & Thapa, 2004; Ghimire, 2015; Law, 2001; Okumus et al., 2005; Reddy, 2005; Senbeto & Hon, 2020; Yang et al., 2011). Large-scale disasters, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, drew attention from the public because they generated extensive numbers of deaths, severe damage to property and buildings, and disruption of the order for the affected areas (Bilham, 2010; DesRoches, Comerio, Eberhard, Mooney, & Rix, 2011; Neumayer & Barthel, 2011; Prideaux, Laws, & Faulkner, 2007; Wang, 2009; Yin & Li, 2001). Even though the negative impacts of the severity of natural disasters have been extensively verified, recent literature has argued that natural disasters may generate some positive factors for tourism development in affected regions (Huang, Yin, Yang, Luo, & Huang, 2020; Rittichainuwat & Chakraborty, 2009; Walters et al., 2015), and the argument needs further testing in different scenarios (e.g., where natural disasters frequently occur).
Disaster frequency is as important as severity when understanding the impacts of natural disasters on inbound tourism, but it is largely ignored in post-disaster tourism research. The findings of the impacts of the frequency of man-made disasters are controversial. Pizam and Fleischer (2002) found that the frequency of terrorism events resulted in a greater negative influence on the number of inbound tourists while Omer and Yesiltas (2020) argued that disaster frequency did not have a significant influence on tourism. Generally, previous studies came to a controversial conclusion regarding the relationship between disasters and tourist arrivals from the perspective of a single event. The argument of the effect of disaster frequency on inbound tourist flows should be further tested in the context of multiple natural disasters.
For further exploration, this study quantifies disaster frequency and severity to model the synergistic effect of natural disasters on inbound tourist flows. In this study, we follow the method of Rosselló et al. (2020) in adopting the definition of a natural disaster by CRED, which includes six groups of hazards, namely, geophysical hazards, meteorological hazards, hydrological hazards, climatological hazards, biological hazards, and extraterrestrial hazards. We integrate the global datasets of natural disasters and bilateral international tourist flows from 177 countries from 1995 to 2018, including 9892 and 258,401 instances, respectively. A panel regression is conducted to examine the relationships, and the results are rigorously examined using several robustness tests.
Section snippets
Natural disasters in tourism
Natural disasters have a great impact on tourism. Many studies have demonstrated that natural disasters hinder the development of tourism (Ghobarah, Saatcioglu, & Nistor, 2006; Parajuli & Haynes, 2016; Shaw, Saayman, & Saayman, 2012) while several recent studies have stated that natural disasters may have positive effects (Biran, Liu, Li, & Eichhorn, 2014; Zhang, Qu, & Tavitiyaman, 2009). As far as we know, these conclusions were mainly based on the analysis of a single disaster. During the
Model
Following Saha, Su, and Campbell (2016), this paper adopts the panel data technique to examine the synergistic effect of the frequency and severity of natural disasters on inbound tourist flows from the annual perspective. The yearly data on the severity and frequency of natural disasters and numbers of inbound tourists are typical panel data, and they are suitable for panel data analysis (Rosselló et al., 2020; Wooldridge, 2005). With panel data analysis, an increase in the degrees of freedom
Empirical results
Table 3 shows observable variable characteristics and estimator performance. For inbound tourists, the maximum number of international arrivals is 0.107 billion, the minimum number is 181, and the median is 0.366 million. For annual disaster frequency, the minimum number is 0, the maximum number is 43, and the mean is 1.9. For the severity of natural disasters, the number of deaths ranges from 0 to 0.224 million, with an average fatality rate of 302. The damage of natural disasters ranges from
Robustness check
Several robustness checks are performed, and the results are presented in Table 5. We first substitute deaths caused by disasters with the total damage in US$ (TD) (model 6) to measure the impact of the severity of natural disasters. The estimation indicates that the coefficient of TD is negatively significant, indicating a stable result of our previous examination.
Next, we treat the independent variables using one-period lags with a fixed-effect model (model 7) since the time of a disaster's
Conclusion
It is noteworthy to mention an upward trend in the number of natural disasters (Becken et al., 2014; Rosselló et al., 2020). Natural disasters can have widespread influences on tourism, especially on inbound tourist flows in affected areas. Previous researches have mainly focused on the effects of disaster severity without considering the synergistic effect of the frequency and severity of natural disasters from an annual perspective. To enhance the current knowledge, a panel regression with
Funding sources
This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant number 71925003]; Humanities and Social Sciences Research Project of the Ministry of Education in China [Grant number 17YJA630031]; Innovation Spark Project of Sichuan University [Grant number 2018hhf- 37]; Scientific Research Project for Talent Introduction of Sichuan University [Grant number 20822041A4222].
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Tian Lan: Methodology, Writing - original draft. Yang Yang: Conceptualization, Investigation. Yuhong Shao: Data curation, Validation. Mingzhi Luo: Supervision, Validation. Fangyu Zhong: Resources, Validation.
Declaration of Competing Interest
None.
Acknowledgements
Not applicable.
Tian Lan is a doctoral candidate in the School of Business, Sichuan University, China. His research interests center on tourism marketing, marketing strategies, big data marketing, on-line marketing and consumer behavior.
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Tian Lan is a doctoral candidate in the School of Business, Sichuan University, China. His research interests center on tourism marketing, marketing strategies, big data marketing, on-line marketing and consumer behavior.
Yang Yang is an associate professor in the College of History and Culture (Tourism), Sichuan University, Chengdu, China. His research interests include tourism marketing, consumer behavior in tourism and destination marketing.
Yuhong Shao is a doctoral candidate in the College of History and Culture (Tourism), Sichuan University, P.R. China. Her research interests include outbound tourism, tourism employment and tourism economics.
Mingzhi Luo is a lecturer in the College of History and Culture (Tourism), Sichuan University, China. His research interest includes tourism economics and tourism policy. He is currently working on tourism recovery affected by natural disasters.
Fangyu Zhong is a postgraduate student in the College of History and Culture (Tourism), Sichuan University, China. Her research interests include tourism management and sustainable tourism.