Econometric Modelling

China has become the world’s high-growth and second largest economy since its socialist- orientation opening-up reforms in the early 1980s. Due also to its geographical, cultural and historical attractions, the country has become the world’s fourth largest tourism destination and tenth largest tourism earner in 2018 according to the World Tourist Organization. The important role played by tourism in the Chinese economy has been officially recognized by China’s National Development and Reform Commission as a strategic pillar industry development priority. In spite of these, rigorous policy-related studies on China’s tourism have been limited. The paper is a serious econometric study to investigate the determination of China’s tourism and its contribution to the country during the period 1996-2018 for credible data-based policy analysis.  Significantly, the study is carried out appropriately from an economic integration (globalization) growth framework, which is also the expenditure (as opposed to production or income) perspective of the United Nations System of National Accounts 1998/2003. Specifically, a multi-simultaneous equation model of endogenous growth and China’s tourism determination is developed. The model innovatively incorporates gravity theory and classical consumer demand contributors, Ironmonger-Lancaster new commodity attributes and Johansen policy impact add- and sub-factors (i.e., reforms and crises) explicitly in its economic integration structure. The model is then estimated by system methods with official economic and tourism 1996-2018 data from the World Tourism Organization and international databases. The research will contribute to advances in the literature and the findings provide useful insights and appropriate and much needed evidence-based inputs on the determination and contributors of tourism to China’s growth. Recommendations will be provided to key stake-holders such as tourism policy-makers, academic researchers, business analysts and tourism operators for national strategic policy analysis and practical implementation. JEL Classification: C54, F15, F62, Z32, Z38

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has been gaining popularity pertaining to its numerous benefits and ability to be applied in various fields. It helps consumers in making informed decisions and aids service providers in delivering an enhanced service or product. Despite all these benefits, dealing with the huge amounts of eWOM is a consistent problem. eWOM helpfulness comes handy in order to address this issue. In this study, we utilize 16699 hotels related eWOM written by 1099 reviewers which are collected from TripAdvisor.com. Our main objective is to analyze which factors impact eWOM helpfulness and how. For this purpose, eight unique variables belonging to three different categories are selected (eWOM length, eWOM subjectivity, eWOM polarity, eWOM readability, eWOM recency, hotel rating, reviewer badge and reviewer helpfulness) and are analyzed using econometric modelling. Our findings show that hotel rating as well as reviewer badge and helpfulness enjoy a positive significant relationship with eWOM helpfulness. It also suggests that eWOM length, readability and subjectivity positively influences eWOM helpfulness though eWOM polarity and recency are found to have an inverse relationship with the helpfulness of eWOM. Thus, our study reports that review, hotel and reviewer characteristics impact eWOM helpfulness in different ways. This study is summarized with the discussion of theoretical and practical implications.