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Estimating the economic impact of a political conflict on tourism: The case of the Catalan separatist challenge

As an industry, tourism tends to be extremely responsive and vulnerable to political instabilities. Recently, a political conflict occurred in Spain, a leader in international tourism. In October 2017, the regional parliament of Catalonia asserted its independence from Spain, engendering a negative impact on the tourism sector of Catalonia. The main goal of our study is to assess the economic impact of the Catalan separatist challenge on the region’s tourism sector during the last quarter of 2017. To this end, we conducted a counterfactual analysis, based on forecasts generated by a seasonal autoregressive moving average model and an artificial neural network. The forecasts allowed us to calculate the projected number of international and domestic tourist visitors that would have travelled to Catalonia, had the separatist challenge not occurred. According to our results, the Catalan tourist sector effectively forfeited close to €200 million in revenue from the international tourism market, and around €27 million in revenue from the domestic market. These amounts differ from the economic gains attained by the other Spanish Mediterranean regions that compete with Catalonia to attract tourists.