Identifying and Evaluating the Preventing and Enhancing Factors of Outbound Tourism in Iran (ARDL Model)

In the past years, the increase in departure tax has always been criticised. On the other hand, departure tax is one of the government's income to overcome the budget deficit. Regarding the importance of outbound tourism in expanding relations with other countries, the present research tries to investigate the impact of increase in departure tax on outbound tourism in Iran. The period of 2006-2021 was examined in this research due to data access. In this study, the ARDL test method was utilized to check the accumulation in the series and the Granger Causality Method was also used to check the cause and effect relationship between the variables. Dependent variable is the number of outbound trips (in terms of the number of passengers) and the explanatory variables are departure tax, GDP per capita, currency exchange rate, inflation rate and visa cost. The results show that the GDP per capita and the inflation rate have a positive and significant effect on the number of outbound trips, and the exchange rate, visa cost and the departure tax have negative and significant effects on the number of travelers. The size of the coefficients in short term also show that; the absolute values are somewhat lower than the long-run coefficients, which suggests that they reinforce each other in the long-run in trms of mutual effects of the variables. The ECM coefficient is also equal to 62% which shows that in each one-year time period, 62% of the deviation from the long-term balance is compensated.