MONTHLY SEASONAL VARIATIONS: ASIAN TOURISM TO AUSTRALIA

Abstract Tourist arrivals series from Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore to Australia exhibit strong seasonality. For data and policy analysis, it is useful to obtain seasonally adjusted data for international tourism from the respective origin countries. This paper applies the moving average technique for estimating the seasonal components of time series to monthly tourist arrivals time series data to Australia. The autocorrelation and partial autocorrelation functions, the Lagrange multiplier test for the absence of serial correlation, and model selection criteria, namely the Akaike Information Criterion and Schwarz Bayesian Criterion, are used to examine which time series processes best describe international arrivals data for Australia.