Determinants of tourist inflow in Tunisia: "An empirical analysis of competition with morocco"

Tourism is a key pillar for economic growth in North African countries such as Tunisia and Morocco since both countries work on increasing their tourism performance leading to a boost in the country's overall development. This paper investigates key determinants of tourist inflow in Tunisia and their performance compared to Morocco between 2000 and 2020. This empirical study was motivated by the need to understand how Tunisia and Morocco have had different outcomes in their tourism industries despite similar physical and cultural elements using Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) as time series analysis. The data collection aims to determine the interrelationship and performance between economic and socio-political determinants of tourist inflow from both short-term and long-term scales, referring to secondary data from World Development Indicators (WDI) and other reliable sources. Findings from this study were robustly analyzed and discussed according to the ARDL sstep-by-step validity testing. From the research, the positive effects of infrastructure expenditure and political stability on the Tunisian economy are considerable in the short run but limited in the long run due to inefficiencies. GDP per capita, infrastructure investment, and political stability explain a stronger response from Morocco's performance on tourist inflow. Both countries are not immune to the global contraction trends, the variation in exchange rates, and the environment that changes tourism demand. They prove slight adjustment processes to long-term equilibrium; Tunisia has a rather shiftless recovery from short-term trauma than Morocco. Several policy implications for Tunisia have been highlighted to improve tourist competitiveness and to diversify its tourism offerings, including transport infrastructure, eco-tourism, and rebranding. Keywords: Tunisia; Morocco; tourism performance; ARDL model; time series analysis; tourist competitiveness