Territorial attractiveness, tourism and the balance of payments
An ARDL Approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23882/emss26385Keywords:
tourism, territorial attractiveness, balance of payments, ARDL, MoroccoAbstract
The present research examines the impact of territorial attractiveness on Morocco's tourism revenues and its subsequent contribution to the services balance. Using annual data from 2004 to 2020, we employ the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to analyze both short-run and long-run dynamics. Our findings reveal that territorial attractiveness, proxied by foreign direct investment, shows no significant effect on the country’s tourism revenues, suggesting that general territorial attractiveness does not automatically translate into improved services balance through tourism channels. In contrast, economic development, measured by real GDP per capita, turns out to be the primary determinant of tourism receipts, with a long-run elasticity of 1.25, indicating that structural economic development is the key driver of the tourism sector's contribution to the services balance. Exchange rate shows no significant influence. Finally, the system shows rapid adjustment with 90% of deviations corrected within one year. These results suggest that enhancing the services balance through tourism depends primarily on structural economic development and tourism-specific policies rather than general territorial attractiveness or price competitiveness.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Wiame El Amri, Yassine Ait oumzil, Saadia Karmoude, Adil El jouali, Elarbi El fakir
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