Economic determinants of attracting international tourism to Egypt (During the period 1995-2019)

Although Egypt possesses the natural and human components that attract international tourism, the economic components may represent an obstacle to the optimal exploitation of Egypt's tourism potential, which is what prompted the idea of ​​research. The research problem was to identify the economic determinants that may hinder the attraction of international tourism to Egypt. The research hypotheses a negative relationship between the number of tourists coming to Egypt and each of the international tourism expenditures, political instability, the exchange rate and the global unemployment rate, while it hypotheses a positive relationship with investment in international tourism and the rate of output growth. The deductive approach was used in formulating the necessary relationships between the research variables, and the standard approach was relied on to estimate the quantitative relationships between the research variables using the ADRL model and Eviews to reach the most important influencing and determining factors to attract international tourism to Egypt, depending on the data of the World Bank, the Egyptian Ministry of Planning and international tourism organization. The research found that the explanatory variables explain 98% of the international tourism attraction, only 2% are due to other factors. Also, the error correction factor is about 13 months, which means that the ideal number of foreign tourists takes approximately 13 months towards its equilibrium value in the long term. It was also clear that there is a negative relationship between political and security instability and the number of foreign tourists coming to Egypt in both the short and long term, and there is a negative relationship between international tourism expenditures and the number of foreign tourists in both the short and long term, and there is a weak negative relationship between the global unemployment rate And the number of tourists coming to Egypt, as it became clear the insignificance of both the rate of growth of output and investment in international tourism. The research recommended the importance of maintaining the security and stability of Egypt, and the need to work on reducing tourism expenditures so that the Egyptian economy can compete in the international tourism market. The research also recommends the importance of continuing the policy of liberalizing the exchange rate because it reflects the real value of the Egyptian currency and helps to increase exports, whether goods or services, of which tourism represents an important part.