The impact of violence on tourism to Rio de Janeiro

Purpose - Rio de Janeiro has a high tourism potential, and it is the only Brazilian city among the 100 most visited in the world. However, the National Confederation of Commerce of Goods, Services and Tourism estimates that from the total loss of revenue from tourism activities of the State of Rio de Janeiro in 2017, approximately 29 percent of this loss can be attributed to increased violence in the State. Thus, this study aims to estimate the impact of violence on tourist arrivals to Rio de Janeiro. Design/methodology/approach - The analysis is based on a sample of tourist arrivals to Rio de Janeiro from 51 countries, for the period between 2003 and 2016. Violence is represented by violent deaths in the State of Rio de Janeiro as well as in the capital. The estimates are based on panel data methodology. This study reports fixed-effect estimates as well as dynamic panel data estimates obtained through S-GMM. The study runs regressions for the full sample and also for two other samples: one with tourists coming from developed countries and another with tourists from developing countries. Findings - The results reveal that violence negatively impacts tourism to Rio, and it shows that tourists from developed countries are more affected by violence than tourists from developing countries. The findings indicate that for each violent death in the capital of Rio de Janeiro, almost four tourists from developed countries and approximately three tourists from developing countries quit going to Rio de Janeiro. Originality/value - The paper is one of the few to investigate the impacts of urban violence on tourism. The paper provides two contributions. First, it addresses the effect of violent deaths on tourism, bringing evidence to a destination with a high tourism potential, but which suffers from urban violence. Second, the study is the first to investigate whether this relation is different for tourists from countries with distinct levels of development (and thus with different levels of violence). Peer review - The peer review history for this article is available at:https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2019-0590