Holiday taking and income

This paper is the first attempt to estimate the determinants of holiday-taking across several countries. To accomplish this a two-stage estimation procedure is employed which enables incongruous income categories to be transformed into a single income variable. It is found that in the mid-1980s there was a substantial similarity in the holiday taking behaviour of Europeans. The large national differences in holiday participation are explained by differences in income and demographic factors. A remarkable regularity in the responsiveness of the probability of holiday taking to marginal changes in income is found.