Tourism falls apart: How insecurity affects African tourism

Although it seems obvious that tourism flows would be adversely affected by terrorism, crime and corruption, not all the empirical evidence supports this view. This article investigates the extent to which insecurity hurts tourism in Africa. We use a new data set consisting of 187 countries, 38 of which are in Africa, for the period 1995–2017. It combines information on the number of tourist arrivals in African countries with information on three types of security risk – terrorism, crime and corruption. While we find no statistically significant evidence that connects terrorism to tourism globally, we do find an effect for tourists travelling to Africa. Crime, too, hurts tourism, but we find no robust relationship between corruption and tourism. Our results emphasize the importance of government expenditure on safety and security to protect this labour-intensive and pro-poor sector.