Does the Confucius Institute Impact International Travel to China? : A Panel Data Analysis

This paper examines the impact of Confucius Institutes on inbound travel to China. We estimate a panel gravity model of inbound tourism flows to China between 2004 and 2010. We use a Poisson Pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator to control for heteroskedasticity endemic in gravity models (Santos Silva and Tenreyro, 2006). We find that the presence of Confucius Institute(s) in the source country increases overall tourism in general and business and worker tourists in particular