Abstract

Tourism is very important for the country's economy in terms of the positive impact of the balance of payments, employment, source of foreign exchange, increase production diversity and international cultural relationship. Because of these contributions, tourism is accepted as part of economic development especially for many developing countries like Turkey. Tourism data is affected by factors such as economic crisis, security problems and natural disasters as well as many other time series. These factors may cause structural breaks in time series as well as affect the results of tests performance. The main purpose of this study is to examine the cointegration between tourism sector components and economic growth under structural breaks and heteroscedastic or nonnormal error. Results showed that tourism reicept has a positive effect on Turkey's economic growth and balance of payments. In addition real effective exchange rate has no meaningful effect on tourism reicept and the number of tourists increase tourism reicept. Additionally, it has been observed that structural breaks in the series and deviations from the assumption of constant variance affect the relationship between tourism reicept and economic growth. Gregory-Hansen and RALS cointegration test must be used in structural break and heteroscedastic error respectively.