COINTEGRATION ANALYSIS OF TOURISM REVENUES BY THE MEMBER COUNTRIES OF EUROPEAN UNION TO GREECE

The countries of Europe and especially European Union member countries are, traditionally, amongst the most important tourism markets for Greece. The purpose of this article is to investigate the long-run changes in tourism revenues from European Union (EU) member countries to Greece. In order to explain tourism revenues we use a number of leading macroeconomic variables, including the real income of 15 EU member countries, the exchange rate, and some dummies, which examine the crises periods for tourism. The quarterly data that are used for this article cover the period from January 1960 to December 2000. The augmented Dickey-Fuller for unit root is examined in the univariate framework and Johansen's maximum likelihood procedure is used to test the cointegration method and to estimate the number of cointegrated vectors of ``VAR model''-Vector autoregressive processes. Error correction model is estimated to explain tourism revenues from European Union member countries to Greece. The results show that the real income of 15 EU member countries and the exchange rate have a positive effect on tourism revenues of Greece, whereas some political crises have a negative effect on them.