GOVERNANCE QUALITY AND TOURISM:MODERATION OF SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF CRIME

Researchers have identified the impact of crime rates on tourism development, and in this study we intend to look into the possible social causes behind those impacts. In this pursuit, we analyze themoderating role of social determinants of crime in shaping the association between tourism developmentand governance for 30 Asia-Pacific countries over 1990–2017. In methodological terms,we have employed principal component analysis (PCA) for index building and generalized methodof moments (GMM) for the estimation of long run elasticities. Using PCA, we have built separateindices for tourism development and social indicators. Results of GMM indicate that incidents ofunemployment and increase in refugee population can diminish the positive impact of education onthe association between tourism development and governance.