Attendance at cultural sites and tourism flows in Italy

In this paper we evaluates the directions of causality between tourism flows, on the one side, and museum and monument attendance, on the other; we take Italy as a case study, and analyze monthly data over the period January 1996 to December 2007. All considered series are seasonally integrated, and co-integration links emerge. We focus on the error correction mechanism among co-integrated time series to detect the directional link(s) of causality. Clear-cut results emerge: the long-run dynamics of visits to museums and monuments adjust to tourist arrivals (and to overnight stays), while the causality link between average stays and cultural sites’ visits runs from the latter to the former. The non-stationary nature of time series, their co-integration relationships, and the direction of causal links suggest specific implications for tourism and cultural policies.