Tourism in Uganda

Tourism has a huge effect on a country’s economy and governments do what they can to expand their tourist industry, Uganda is not exempt from this, with tourism as its second largest foreign currency after coffee. As a country, Uganda has experienced many years of political unrest and violence, however has shown increasing stability since Museveni come to power. As a testament to the increasing stability, Uganda has managed to engage increasingly in the tourist industry, encouraging tourists to visit the beautiful nature reserves and parks throughout Uganda. Although there have been several years of increasing stability, ethical travellers are still likely to be concerned about the violence, its damage upon the tourist industry, and what they can do to assist the government in creating peace and to help the locals that have suffered trauma from the violence experienced, especially in the north of Uganda.

The hypothesis that political violence deters tourism is mainly based on case study evidence and a few quantitative studies confined to a small sample of countries. This is the first comprehensive, general quantitative test of the impact of various forms of political violence on tourist arrivals. We employ two estimation techniques: a fixed-effects panel estimator with contemporaneous effects only and a dynamic generalized method of moment’s estimator, which allows for lagged effects of political violence on tourism. In both model specifications, we find strong evidence that human rights violations, conflict and other politically motivated violent events negatively impact upon tourist arrivals. In a dynamic model, autocratic regimes, even if they do not resort to violence, have lower numbers of tourist arrivals than more democratic regimes. We also find evidence for intra-regional negative spill-over and cross-regional substitution effects. 

ETT- Kenya Safaris Desk

Etton Travel and Tours