Why Do Some Countries Prosper More in Tourism than Others? Global Competitiveness of Tourism Development

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the competitiveness of tourism destinations, worldwide, utilizing a regional economic policy tool known as the shift-share analysis. The changes in tourist arrivals, tourism receipts, and per-tourist-dollars of each country are assessed and compared with the overall tourism development across 150 countries in the world using a 17-year period (2000-2017). The findings indicate that Japan, Thailand, and Turkey are the most competitive countries when tourist arrivals are specified, but Turkey drops to the least competitive country when tourism receipts are specified as the base indicator. Thailand and Japan rank among the most competitive destinations based on their tourism receipts. Yet further results show that Luxembourg is the most competitive country, demonstrating the largest growth in per-tourist-dollar. Overall, results imply that the competitiveness of the countries and regions vary based on the aggregated measure of tourism development, suggesting that destinations need to focus on growth mechanisms and capitalize on their tourism potential. Practical implications are discussed.

Relations Between Tourism Spending and Global Competitiveness – an Empirical Study in Developed OECD Countries

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Blockchain Technology for Winning Consumer Loyalty: Social Norm Analysis Using Structural Equation Modeling

“…Throughout these years, the tourism industry has become one of the most important economic sectors worldwide for two reasons: Because of its share in the gross domestic product (GDP), and because of the capacity to generate employment that it can develop all over the world, thanks also to the important connection and indirect relationship it has with other sectors [1,2]. This situation is empirically demonstrable with China, where tourism specialization in recent years has played a fundamental role in promoting sustainable development [3][4][5].…”

A New Spatial Shift‐Share Decomposition: An Application to Tourism Competitiveness in Italian Regions

“…The proposed reformulation of spatial shift-share analysis is here applied to inbound tourism in the Italian regions to investigate their competitiveness. Although SSA is a technically simple procedure that enables us to accurately capture the underlining changes in the variable under consideration, it has not been widely used in the field of tourism (Yun and Yang 2008) and only a few studies use SSA to explore tourist destination competitiveness (Dogru, Suess, and Sirakaya-Turk 2020;Sirakaya, Choi, and Var 2002;Yun et al 2007). Among them, only the study by Yun et al (2007) proposed and applied a spatial formulation of SSA in an investigation of the competitiveness of international tourism in Jiangsu province.…”