TOURISM PROMOTION, TOURISM REVENUES AND SECTORAL OUTPUTS IN THAILAND

Since 2010, tourism promoting policies have been implemented to drive economic growth and also economic development in Thailand. Government allocated a significant budget to promote tourism sector. As a result, tourism revenues have also been increased significantly. The increasing in the number of visitors induced the domestic final demand and the output in tourism related sectors. However, the different group of visitors will response to the tourism promoting policy in the different ways. Following the Johansen system cointegration, the results indicate that the tourism revenue in each group of visitors was response to the difference set of macroeconomic factors. The estimated normalized cointegration vectors confirm the positive relationship between government budget for promoting tourism and tourism revenue for all groups of visitors. For the sectoral analysis, tourism revenue, naturally, induces final demand and initiates output only in a few sectors. According to the results, the policies are (1) continuously promote tourism sectors in term of government budget, (2) set up a specific policy for each group of visitors and (3) income re-distribution to the sector which are not related to tourism sector.