The swine flu and its impacts on tourism in Brunei

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how to disentangle the impacts of the swine flu on tourism in Brunei, which overlaps with the continued effects of the 2008 global financial crisis that occurred earlier using the auto regressive integrated moving average and intervention time series analysis methods. Estimating the impacts of the swine flu for the first 12 months' post-swine flu period, we have predicted the number of tourists by fitting two auto regressive integrated moving average models: one for the swine flu and another for the global financial crisis which occurred and affected the number of tourist arrivals; and one intervention time series analysis model. It is shown that the number of tourists have been reduced significantly due to both the swine flu and the global financial crisis, which is reconfirmed by testing the coefficients of the fitted intervention time series analysis model. It is found that a small country like Brunei lost nearly 30, 000 (15%) tourists and B$15 million dollars due to the swine flu during the first twelve months’ post-swine flu period.