Winners and losers in the Arab uprisings: a Mediterranean tourism perspective

This paper analyses the effects of the recent Arab uprisings on tourism destinations located along the Mediterranean coastline. It uses time-series analysis to model international tourist arrivals. First, autoregressive integrated moving average models are estimated for the period 1980–2009 and predicted for 2010–2014 to establish suitable country controls. Second, Bayesian structural time-series models – designed primarily to determine causal impacts in on-line marketing campaigns – are used to establish the effects of the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Spain and Greece. The main conclusion is that the models clearly capture the negative impact of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and their positive impacts on Morocco and Turkey. However, the effects on Spain and Greece are less clear and depend crucially on the set of controls used in the analysis.