Migration and outbound tourism: Evidence from Italy

• Italian outbound tourism trips are disaggregated by purpose of visit.
• A dynamic panel data analysis provides evidence of the twofold impact of migration.
• Italian immigrants abroad pull outbound tourism trips for all tourist’ categories.
• Only holiday trips are not pushed by foreign-born immigrants residing in Italy.
• The impact of income and relative prices differs among tourist’ categories.

This paper investigates the impact of migration on Italian outbound tourism trips disaggregated by purpose of visit. A dynamic panel data analysis is carried out on a sample of 65 countries over the period 2005–2011. To disentangle pushing and pulling effects, the migration variables are defined at both the origin and the destination of tourism flows. We also control for the Italian real GDP per capita, relative prices and distance. The results show that the stock of Italians residing abroad has a positive impact on outbound tourism for all purposes. Conversely, the stock of foreign-born citizens residing in Italy appears to push Italian outbound tourism for business purposes, for visiting friends and relatives, but not for holiday trips.