The Impact of Emigrants and Study-Abroad Students on China’s Outbound Tourism

Immigration can induce tourism. The purpose of this paper is to investigate that how immigrants influence on Mainland China’s outbound tourism flow. The gravity model is developed and estimated using data from 1999 to 2013 for 34 OECD destination countries. Importantly this paper first demonstrates that short-run immigrants, namely international students, can also affect the demand of tourism. Tourism arrivals from China to OECD members are regressed against GDP, distance, real exchange rate, stock of OECD residents born in China, which is used as a proxy for immigration from China, and the number of Chinese students study aboard in OECD countries. The results empirically support the connection between immigration and outbound tourism. The emigration elasticity estimated is 0.230 and the study-abroad student elasticity is 0.113. It proves that the stock of Chinese residing abroad (including the international students) has a positive pulling effect on China’s outbound tourism. Not only the regular visiting friends and relatives trip triggered by emigrants and study-abroad students can induce tourism inflow from China to OECD countries. Those who have business connections with emigrants between OECD countries and China will also increase the tourism outflow from China by travel for business purpose. In China, there are huge demand for migration and study abroad. Chinese people are interesting in investigating popular migration and study abroad destination countries by joining a short term inspecting travel route before they decide which country to apply. By doing this, those countries who have more stock of immigrant and international students born in China can have more attraction to Chinese tourists.