EXPLORING THE NEXUS BETWEEN TOURISM DEMAND AND CULTURAL SIMILARITY

This article attempts to bring an economic underpinning to tourism research. It uses the gravity model to derive an econometric model to explore the relationship between cultural similarity and tourism demand, with special reference to Australia inbound tourism from 42 source countries. Since language and religion are thought to be the main exposition and carrier of culture, we developed a continuous, normalized, and time variant index to capture the similarity in language and religious profile between a source country and Australia. The inclusion of these indexes in an empirical model yields OLS and quantile results that support the belief that there is a close link between culture similarity and tourism demand.