The American Invasion of Europe: The Long Term Rise in Overseas Travel, 1820-2000
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NBER Working Paper No. 13977
Issued in May 2008
NBER Program(s): DAE
Tourism today is an activity of substantial economic importance worldwide, and has been for some time. Tourism is also of substantial economic importance in the United States, sufficient to warrant the Bureau of Economic Analysis's establishing special accounts on travel and tourism. In this paper we investigate the long term rise in overseas travel by Americans. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the number of Americans going abroad rose from less than 2,000 travelers to over 26 million. The industry went from one confined to the elite of American society to what some have described as mass tourism. We document this rise by compiling a long term series on overseas travel, and describe the changes in the composition of the travelers, their destinations, and their mode of travel. We use an Error Correction Model to explain how the increase came about.
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