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Corruption is widely believed to have an adverse effect on economic development. There is a large body of literature on the consequences of corruption and how institutions can control it. However, the role of political and economic crisis as an explanatory factor that has been relatively under-studied. Moreover, there is scant literature on the inter-relationships between economic and political crisis, institutions, and corruption. This paper addresses the question: how do political and economic crisis and institutional quality matter in affecting corruption? More specifically, if a higher level of rule of law allays the possible adverse effect that political and economic crisis may have on corruption. To answer this question, we use a recently released historical panel dataset called VDEM for over hundred countries over 1800-2020 years. The results suggest some heterogenous effects depending on the type of crisis and how we measure it. For example, strong institutions can control corruption in cases of political and civil violence and economic slowdown, but the effect is not seen in other crisis such as democracy break downs, coups, armed conflict and civil war and currency, inflation, and debt crisis.

This current research examines the country and neighbouring risk effects on visitor number flows using novel random heterogeneous-trend techniques and the conventional panel of fixed and random effects models across 131 countries during 2001-2016. Results show that individual country risks deter both inbound and outbound tourism. However, risks in a neighbourhood region only adversely affect the outbound flows from a country. The results can provide an inference basis for the potential impacts on visitor flows after the conflicts between Russia and Ukraine accelerated in 2022 and heighten the country and neighbour risks in the European region.

This study examines the effects of an unfavorable political event or environmental hostility, namely, a blockade affecting international tourist inflows, and how tourism market diversification (TMD) could mitigate the adverse effects in the case of Qatar. To quantify these effects, we adopted a standard tourism-demand model and augmented it with a Herfindahl index (HI) for the geographical diversification of tourism exports, a dummy variable for the blockade, and an interaction variable. We further analyzed the tourist inflows from various regions using regional dummies and their interaction terms to capture the different impacts of the blockade on Qatar’s inbound tourists from 46 source countries between 2006 and 2019. This study applied a panel-based differenced system-generalized method-of-moments estimation to reveal several interesting findings. First, there was a significant positive individual effect of TMD on inbound tourism. Second, during the blockade, Qatar witnessed growing tourist inflows from Asia and Australasia, the Americas, and Europe. However, the incident inevitably placed severe constraints on some tourist flows to Qatar, primarily from Middle Eastern and African countries. Moreover, although the HI has a positive impact on tourism growth, our study revealed that the interaction terms between the HI and the blockade are only statistically significant in some cases, implying that a diversification strategy cannot completely mitigate the harmful effects of a blockade on tourism due to the severity of blockade effect. Nevertheless, a TMD strategy appears to be successful at the individual level.

This study examines the effects of an unfavorable political event or environmental hostility, namely, a blockade affecting international tourist inflows, and how tourism market diversification (TMD) could mitigate the adverse effects in the case of Qatar. To quantify these effects, we adopted a standard tourism-demand model and augmented it with a Herfindahl index (HI) for the geographical diversification of tourism exports, a dummy variable for the blockade, and an interaction variable. We further analyzed the tourist inflows from various regions using regional dummies and their interaction terms to capture the different impacts of the blockade on Qatar’s inbound tourists from 46 source countries between 2006 and 2019. This study applied a panel-based differenced system-generalized method-of-moments estimation to reveal several interesting findings. First, there was a significant positive individual effect of TMD on inbound tourism. Second, during the blockade, Qatar witnessed growing tourist inflows from Asia and Australasia, the Americas, and Europe. However, the incident inevitably placed severe constraints on some tourist flows to Qatar, primarily from Middle Eastern and African countries. Moreover, although the HI has a positive impact on tourism growth, our study revealed that the interaction terms between the HI and the blockade are only statistically significant in some cases, implying that a diversification strategy cannot completely mitigate the harmful effects of a blockade on tourism due to the severity of blockade effect. Nevertheless, a TMD strategy appears to be successful at the individual level.