DO TOURISM MARKETS OF TURKEY CONVERGE?

We aim to analyze the stochastic convergence hypothesis for 14 major tourist source markets of Turkey using monthly data over the period January 1996 to December 2012. To this aim, we use recently developed the two-step LM (Lagrange multiplier) unit root test that allow for two structural breaks in data. Our findings indicate that 10 out of 14 markets are stochastically converging, meaning that tourism polices and strategies directed at these markets are successful. In other words, the presence of convergence in the tourism market indicates that the difference between total visitor arrivals to Turkey and visitor arrivals from any one of the converging source markets is not drifting apart.