On the role of cultural participation in tourism destination performance: an assessment using robust conditional efficiency approach

Abstract

The relationship between culture and tourism has been widely investigated from different perspectives. A large strand of literature studies the role of cultural heritage to attract tourists, while a rich bulk of studies on cultural participation investigates the impact of tourism flows on the demand for culture. Another aspect worth investigating relates to the link between cultural participation and the performance of tourism destinations (TDs), as a higher cultural participation in an area could boost the performance in the management of tourism resources. However, so far, this issue has been disregarded in the literature, and this paper aims at filling this gap. Specifically, it studies the effect of cultural participation on TDs' performance using a conditional efficiency approach that ensures robust inference on the role of environmental factors. We employ data on the Italian regions for the period 2004-2010, and we explore the role of cultural participation for tourism by using several indicators. Our findings offer empirical support to the positive role of cultural participation and, thus, suggest that public cultural policies might also boost the efficiency of the tourism sector.

Analyzing hotel efficiency from a regional perspective: The role of environmental determinants

“…Barros et al (2011) also employed tourism attractions, which are similar to, though not the same as, those of the Spanish authors. Detotto et al (2014), Guccio et al (2017), Huang et al (2012) and Pulina et al (2010) used quite different determinants, such as size, cultural participation or art city. A few papers have also considered market variables.…”

“…Among the few that have, Huang et al (2012) included the ratio of inbound arrivals received to total inbound arrivals, whereas Guccio et al (2017) considered the average spending of tourists.…”

“…The main question is whether hotels operate efficiently, i.e., whether they use (scarce) resources in an efficient way. Despite the importance of destination performance, research on hotel efficiency at a regional level is limited (Barros et al, 2011;Benito, Solana, & López, 2014;Botti, Peypoch, Robinot, & Solonandrasana, 2009;Brida, Garrido, Deidda, & Pulina, 2012;Detotto, Pulina, & Brida, 2014;Guccio, Lisi, Martorana, & Mignosa, 2017;Huang, Mesak, Hsu, & Qu, 2012;Pulina, Detotto, & Paba, 2010;Solana-Ibáñez, Caravaca-Garratón, & Para-González, 2016). Assaf, Josiassen, Woo, Agbola, and Tsionas (2017) recently called for more research on specific destinations.…”

Modelling museum efficiency in producing inter-reliant outputs

“…By applying regression models, analyses to complement efficiency studies have thus been developed in an effort to measure the link between the efficiency ratios obtained and the different contextual variables, related mainly to the socioeconomic features of the area in which the institutions are located. Such analytical techniques have been widely applied in tourist destination efficiency studies, specifically exploring the impact of cultural variables on tourist competitiveness (Cuccia et al, 2016;Herrero and Gómez, 2017;Figueroa et al, 2018;Guccio et al, 2017). Nevertheless, they have been applied to a lesser degree in the case of cultural institutions.…”

“…This methodological approach has given rise to numerous applications in the field of efficiency evaluation of cultural institutions such as libraries (Vitaliano, 1998;Geys, 2011 andGuccio et al, 2018;Simon et al, 2011); archives , entities devoted to protecting and maintaining cultural heritage (Finocchiaro-Castro and Rizzo, 2009;Finocchiaro-Castro et al, 2011;Guccio et al, 2014), and even efficiency analysis of tourist destinations based on territorial production functions (Cuccia et al, 2016;Herrero and Gómez, 2017;Figueroa et al, 2018;Guccio et al, 2017). However, to the best of our knowledge, and bearing in mind that museums are one of the most commonly explored cultural institutions in efficiency evaluation studies, to date there are no analyses that consider this analytical approach for evaluating efficiency in two stages and gauging the impact of external variables in the case of museums.…”