A seasonal analysis of Asian tourist arrivals to Australia

Rapid economic growth in South-East and East Asia has seen a surge in touri st arrivals from this region to Australia in the 1990s, prior to the curren cy crisis in late 1997. The purpose of the paper is to use Autoregressive I ntegrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models to explain the nonstationary season ally unadjusted quarterly tourist arrivals from Wong Kong and Singapore to Australia from 1975(1) to 1996(4). As the tourist arrivals series display s trong seasonal patterns, deterministic and stochastic seasonality are exami ned as possible explanations for variations in the international tourist ar rivals series. The Hylleberg et al. (Journal of Econometrics, 99, pp. 215-3 8, 1990) test for seasonal unit roots is used to examine stochastic seasona lity in the various series.