The effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on tourism in Africa

This article focuses on the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on tourism in several African countries located in Eastern and Southern Africa, focusing on five, namely, Burundi, Eswatini, Kenya, Mauritius and Seychelles which are important tourism destinations in Africa. For this purpose, fractional integration methods are used, which are very convenient to analyze the effects of shocks. Our results indicate that if we use data ending at December 2019, the series are mean reverting and the degree of persistence moves from low values in Mauritius and Seychelles to the highest value in Eswatini. However, if we included data referring to the Covid-19 period a substantial increase in the degree of persistence is observed, and the hypothesis of a unit root cannot be rejected for Eswatini or Mauritius with the original data and neither for Burundi or Seychelles with the log-transformed data. This implies that these economies need to increase their economic diversification to reduce excessive reliance on tourism where shocks tend to persist. Thus, only Kenya still displays a degree of mean reversion behavior and the development of innovative tourism products in Kenya can make tourism an even more important pillar of the economy.