Regional visa-waiver program for open tourism development

Tourism development is known to have an important impact on the economic growth and the competitiveness of the region. For tourism development, the Jeju local government introduced a visa-waiver program that is valid only for the Jeju region. In addition, the regional visa-waiver program was possible in Korea, which has a stronger centralized system, because of strong cooperation in tourism from the central government. To our knowledge, few countries have introduced a visa policy at regional level like Jeju. Therefore, it is important to study the relationship between this unique regional visa policy and tourism development from the open tourism perspective. Meanwhile, citizens of countries that do not have a visa agreement with Korea must have a direct flight from the departure point to Jeju to benefit from this program. To alleviate this problem, domestic airports where inbound travelers whose final destinations is Jeju can transit without a Korean visa having been designated. The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of these programs on inbound tourism demand. For this, a Difference-In-Differences estimator has been used. From the results, both programs were found to have a statistically significant effect on the increase of inbound tourism in Jeju.