Cultural Effects on Inbound Tourism into the USA: A Gravity Approach

Abstract

This paper addresses the effects of cultural, and particularly religious, factors on tourist flows into the USA, the world's most popular tourist destination. To estimate this empirically, the author runs an augmented gravity equation. The results provide evidence that cultural proximity between country of origin and country of destination has positive effects on the tourism flows between those countries. In particular, after controlling for a set of geographical variables, more people from countries with the same language (English) and high governmental rankings comparable to that of the USA travel to the USA for holidays than people from other countries. Above all, there is strong evidence that tourists from Christian countries prefer the USA as a holiday destination much more than people from other countries. This finding is stable across model specifications and supports the argument that people wish to go on vacation to countries with similar cultural and political backgrounds to their own.