Business cylce and museum visitors in Taiwan

From the educational/cultural aspect of the demand for museum visits, there is a theoretical prediction for the negative relation of museum visits to the business cycle. From the viewpoint of recreational tourism, there is an expected pro-cyclical impact of macroeconomic factors on museum visits. This paper thus employs the GARCH (generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic) model with an error correction term to investigate the relationship between the business cycle and museum visits in Taiwan. Our empirical evidence shows that the unemployment rate, exchange rate, and real money balance have a procyclical impact on museum visits, indicating the recreational components of such visits.