Hassan Heidari - Associate Professer, Department of Economics,Urmia University, Urmia
Sahar Bashiri - Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Economics, University of Sistan and Baluchestan, Zahedan,

This paper investigates the long-run relationship among important macroeconomic variables including exchange rate, inflation, human education in tourism sector, number of tourism agencies and number of hotels on the aggregate tourism income in Iran. The Bounds testing approach to level relationship employed to investigate this relationship over the period of 1978-2010. Our results reveal that there are significant and under consideration effects of macroeconomic variables and aggregate tourism income. The results show that the number of hotels, investment made for training person in tourism sector, and the numbers of tourism agencies have positive effects on the income from foreign tourism. Therefore development of tourism infrastructure including hotels, training person in tourism sector and increase in number of agencies can attract foreign tourism. Exchange rate, inflation and dummy variable related to the imposed Iraq-Iran war have negative effects on the foreign tourism income.

Macroeconomic Variables, Aggregate Tourism income, Iran