Does crime-tourism nexus hold for Pakistan?

Purpose: The primary objective of this study is to investigate the linkage of tourism and crime for Pakistan along with exchange rates, terrorism and domestic prices in the presence of structural breaks over the period 1984–2017. Design/methodology/approach: The order of integration is tested through ADF and PP unit root tests. The robustness of unit root test is testified via structural break unit root test. Furthermore, the authors use Bayer and Hanck (2013) combined cointegration test to confirm the existence of a long-term theoretical relationship among the variables. For the robustness of cointegration analysis, the authors also employ ARDL bound testing in the presence of structural break years. Moving forward, the authors apply VECM Granger causality to find out the direction of causality. Subsequently, variance decomposition approach and impulse response function are used to distinguish leader from the followers. Findings: The unit root test shows that the order of integration is one, I(1). The cointegration analysis confirms the long-run relationship between underlying variables. The authors find inverse and significant impact of crime and exchange rate on tourism in the long run. On contrary, domestic prices play a positive and significant role to determine tourism in short and long run. Also, terrorism is found to be insignificant with negative impact. Further, the bidirectional causality between crime and tourism is observed in the long run. Similarly, unidirectional causality from terrorism to exchange and exchange rate to domestic price is observed in the short run. Originality/value: The contemporary studies on crime-tourism nexus offer limited evidence, as they frequently suffer from omitted variable bias and ignore possible endogeneity issues. This study uses vector autoregressive models to overcome these biases. Similarly, the authors accommodate the role of structural break years through their analysis. Hence, the results offer more credible evidence. Moreover, the authors contribute to the existing tourism demand literature by adding crime as a potential determinate in case of Pakistan.