Publication: Foreign Informational Lobbying Can Enhance Tourism : Evidence from the Caribbean
No Thumbnail Available
An error occurred retrieving the object's statistics
Date
2009
ISSN
03043878
Published
2009
Author(s)
Gawande, Kishore
Montes-Rojas, Gabriel
Editor(s)
Abstract
There exist legal channels for informational lobbying of US policymakers by foreign principals. Foreign governments and private sector principals frequently and intensively use this institutional channel to lobby on trade and tourism issues. This paper empirically studies whether such lobbying effectively achieves its goal of trade promotion in the context of Caribbean tourism, and suggests the potential for using foreign lobbying as a vehicle for development. Panel data are used to explore and quantify the association between foreign lobbying by Caribbean principals and US tourist arrivals to Caribbean destinations. A variety of sensitivity analyses support the finding of a strong association. The policy implications are obvious and potentially important for developing countries.
Link to Data Set
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Citations
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Can Foreign Lobbying Enhance Development? The Case of Tourism in the Caribbean(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-07)There exist legal channels for informational lobbying of U.S. policymakers by foreign principals. Foreign governments and private sector principals frequently and intensively use this institutional channel to lobby on trade and tourism issues. The authors empirically study whether such lobbying effectively achieves its goal of trade promotion in the context of Caribbean tourism and it is the first paper to examine the potential for using foreign lobbying as a vehicle for development. They use panel data to explore and quantify the association between foreign lobbying by Caribbean principals and U.S. tourist arrivals to Caribbean destinations. A variety of sensitivity analyses support the finding of a strong association. The policy implications are obvious and potentially important for developing countries.Publication Foreign Informational Lobbying Can Enhance Tourism : Evidence from the Caribbean(2009-02-01)There exist legal channels for informational lobbying of U.S. policymakers by foreign principals. Foreign governments and private sector principals frequently and intensively use this institutional channel to lobby on trade and tourism issues. This paper empirically studies whether such lobbying effectively achieves its goal of trade promotion in the context of Caribbean tourism, and suggests the potential for using foreign lobbying as a vehicle for development. Panel data are used to explore and quantify the association between foreign lobbying by Caribbean principals and U.S. tourist arrivals to Caribbean destinations. A variety of sensitivity analyses support the finding of a strong association. The policy implications are obvious and potentially important for developing countries.Publication Does Formality Improve Micro-firm Performance? Evidence from the Brazilian SIMPLES Program(2011)This paper exploits an extensive Brazilian micro-enterprise survey and the 1996 introduction of a business tax reduction and simplification scheme (SIMPLES) to examine three questions. First, do high tax rates and complex tax regulations really constitute a barrier to the formalization of micro-firms? Second, does formalization improve firm performance measured along several dimensions, including revenues, employment and capital stock? Third, what are the channels through which this occurs? We find that SIMPLES led to a significant increase in formality in several dimensions. Moreover, newly created firms that opt for operating formally show higher levels of revenue and profits, employ more workers and are more capital intensive (only for those firms that have employees). The channel through which this occurs is not access to credit or contracts with larger firms. Rather, it appears that the lower cost of contracting labor leads to adopting production techniques that involve a permanent location and a larger paid labor force.Publication Releasing Constraints to Growth or Pushing on a String? Policies and Performance of Mexican Micro-firms(2009)Using firm-level data from Mexico, this paper investigates the firm characteristics associated with participation in credit markets, access to training, tax payments, and membership in business associations. We find that firms which participate in these institutions exhibit significantly higher profits. Moreover, firms that borrow from formal or informal sources and those that pay taxes are significantly more likely to stay in business but firms that received credit exhibit lower rates of income growth. These results persist when firm characteristics that are arguably correlated with unobserved entrepreneurial ability are controlled for. Our findings suggest that the significant within-country differences in firm productivity observed in developing economies are due in part to market and government failures that limit the ability of micro-firms to reach their optimal sizes.Publication On Linkages and Leakages: Measuring the Secondary Effects of Tourism(2010)Tourism multipliers are widely used tools of services trade analysis. Yet, their derivation and interpretation has often been inconsistent and confusing. This article presents a unifying approach for calculating indicators of tourism linkages and leakages, derives these multipliers for a large sample of more than 150 countries and statistically assesses the relationship among the multipliers, along with several other economic indicators. Contrary to widely held views, the multipliers for tourism linkages and leakages are noncomplementary, as they are based on different economic concepts, so that no particular correlation is to be expected. This independence is confirmed in the empirical cross-country analysis. Moreover, the analysis finds a positive association between the degree of linkages and per-capita income, trade openness and the friendliness of the business climate.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
No results found.