An application of catastrophe theory on interpreting post-SARS arrival recovery patterns

Abstract

In 2003, many Asian countries suffered seriously from the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The outbreak of SARS caused a crisis in the tourism industry in many parts of Asia in that year. The purpose of this study is to examine and compare the post-SARS recovery patterns of inbound arrivals from Japan and Hong Kong in Taiwan. Taking catastrophe theory as its foundation, this study proposes a well-grounded approach to the understanding of the nature of the recovery processes and to the explanation of the difference between the recovery patterns displayed by arrivals from Japan and arrivals from Hong Kong. This study successfully demonstrates a method of applying cusp catastrophe theory to problems that can be: (1) defined by two continuous independent control variables and one discrete dependent (system state) variable, and (2) characterized by sudden system state change behavior, namely the continuous quantitative change of the control variables, causing a discontinuous qualitative change of the state variable. Implications regarding tourism promotion policies are drawn from the analysis.