The economic impacts of terror in Turkey on tourism

The increasing level of prosperity and accessibility of transportation since the beginning of the 20th century has played an important role in the increase in global tourist mobility. Turkey's policies after the 1960s have made a positive contribution to economic growth indicators such as number of tourists, tourism revenues, investment, and employment. Consequently, Turkey's tourism economy has become one of the few distinguishable countries in the world. Tourism, which has a fragile structure, is shown as one of the sectors that can be most easily affected by the economic crises. In this context, Turkey has witnessed terrorist attacks throughout its history and was ranked 17th in the tourism index in 2018. In this study, the impact of terrorist incidents between 1990 and 2017 on the number of incoming tourists will be examined throughout 3 sub-periods by using regression analyses. The findings show that while the general terrorist incidents do not have a negative effect on the number of incoming tourists, the terrorist incidents in Istanbul have significant and negative impact on incoming tourists. In addition, it was determined that the terrorist incidents in Diyarbakır and Ankara had a negative effect only on the number of incoming tourists between 1990-2000. The findings further show that while the number of injuries and deaths due to terrorist incidents was not significant on the number of incoming tourists, the crucial political events such as the July 15 Coup Attempt and the Russian Aircraft Crisis, which are shown as dummy variables in the analyses, negatively affected the number of incoming tourists. When the impact of the Turkish Lira's economic value on the number of incoming tourists was investigated, it is concluded that the depreciaed Turkish Lira against the American Dollar has a positive impact on the number of incoming tourists. Moreover, the findings show that the searches made on Google have a positive and significant impact on the number of incoming tourists implying that tourists mostly search about destinations of their visits in advance.