Achieving tourist destination competitiveness: Evidence from Latin‐American and Caribbean countries

Abstract

We evaluate tourist efficiency in Latin‐America and the Caribbean, an area of growing interest in international tourism. We take 17 countries with homogeneous information for 2011–2015 and apply a two‐stage conditioned evaluation. We gauge efficiency using data envelopment analysis of a production function to maximize overnight stays given tourist resources and estimate the impact of external factors for infrastructures, cultural and natural resources, level of development, and so forth. We use a double bootstrap procedure to correct bias in efficiency ratios and serial correlation with second stage variables. We find that countries operate below their possibilities when attracting international tourism. The most efficient are in the Caribbean and Mexico, who specialize in sun and sand tourism. There is evidence that cultural resources and transport infrastructure improve performance. We find the opposite for natural resources and other infrastructures. This research furthers our knowledge of tourist efficiency analysis in an area where such studies remain scarce.

Clustering and country destination performance at a global scale: Determining factors of tourism competitiveness

“…Firstly, with regard to natural heritage factors, we see how the variable used for each cluster proves significant, but with a negative effect; in other words, natural resources do not seem to improve countries’ efficiency when it comes to attracting international tourism. This result is in line with the findings reported by Gómez-Vega and Herrero-Prieto (2018), specifically for Latin America. Additionally, this result may be related to the negative effect that oversizing the tourist industry might have had on the sustainability of natural resources, particularly in highly developed countries in cluster 1 (Buckley, 2012).…”

“…Another series of works extend the scale of analysis to the country level, albeit contextualized within a single continent, thereby favouring sample homogeneity. Prominent in this regard are the applications of Soysal-Kurt (2017) and Radovanov et al (2020) focused on Europe, and Gómez-Vega and Herrero-Prieto (2018), who apply a two-stage conditioned efficiency model to the tourist sector in 17 countries in Latin America and report the determining effect of cultural resources.…”

Key factors in tourism management to improve competitiveness in Latin America

“…Costa Rica therefore has a high ranking according to both methods. Gómez-Vega and Herrero-Prieto (2018) highlighted the competitiveness of Mexico and the Caribbean. In the case of the proposed indicator, Mexico is the fourth most competitive Latin American tourist destination.…”

“…In many countries, tourism activity has overtaken traditional leading sectors (Mendola and Volo, 2017; Martín et al , 2014). In addition to its direct impacts, tourism activity has additional knock-on effects, such as improved infrastructure, better service provision, improved tax collection and the attraction of foreign investment (Gómez-Vega and Herrero-Prieto, 2018). In the current context of economic uncertainty, dependence on tourism activity has raised concerns among many governments.…”

Development, contributions and trends in regional studies in Spain: An overview

“…and the innovative and original work produced recently by Herrero‐Prieto, Boal‐San Miguel, and Gómez‐Vega (), on the deep‐rooted culture and economic development taking the seven deadly sins to build a well‐being composite indicator Application of economic impact models of cultural events and prototypes of cultural heritage, such as the Alhambra (Murillo, Romaní, & Suriñach, ) or the impact of the Guggenheim Museum (Plaza, ) and the Easter celebrations (Lafuente, Sanz, & Devesa, ), the Fair of Seville (Palma‐Martos, García Sánchez, & Palma‐Martos, ), film festivals (Devesa, Báez, Figueroa, & Herrero, ) or the election of a city as European capital of culture (Herrero, Sanz, Bedate, Devesa, & del Barrio, ). It is also very useful and innovating the work of Herrero‐Prieto, Boal‐San Miguel and Gómez‐Vega () on a well‐being composite indicator, related to culture and Economic Development. Analysis of the impact of cultural tourism and the efficiency of tourist destinations, which include regional studies: Gómez‐Vega and Herrero (, ) and Figueroa, Herrero, Báez, and Gómez (). Some new contributions are peying attention to the case of the small towns, both from the touristic point of view and the historical and cultural heritage (Escalona‐Orcao et al () In summary, this is a very promising field, in which some Spanish researchers have already defined the lines to develop similar studies in other countries.…”