Working Paper 02-2011: Infrastructure and Tourism Development: Dual Approach

This paper models tourist arrivals into Mauritius from various parts of the world with a view to understand the contribution of different determinants in explaining the success of the island as an international tourism destination. A dual methodological approach was adopted namely panel date and survey frameworks. Results from the econometric analysis indicate that infrastructure capital is positively related to total tourist arrivals as well as on arrivals from the three regions considered. European and American tourists are observed to attach sizeable importance to such infrastructure. Results from the dynamic panel data analysis (GMM methods) are overall consistent those of the fixed effect model. The presence of repeat visits was also detected. Results from the survey analysis overall validate that of the initial set of results particularly to comfort, cleanliness and security. The respondents tended to place lot of emphasis on the availability and quality of public transport, where many of the elements falling under this dimension were rated high with mean score. Univariate descriptive statistics also reveal that public utilities (water and electricity) were the most important. The mean score for the case of soft infrastructure were relatively high side which indicating that the tourists equally ascribe high importance to the soft infrastructure.