QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF COMPETITIVENESS ON INTERNATIONAL TOURISM DESTINATIONS

The purpose of this research is to analyze the evolution of tourism competitiveness at a country level over the last years and to quantify how this evolution affects tourism figures. The research hypothesis is: Competitiveness of international tourism destinations influences tourism magnitudes. To test this hypothesis a mobility table was built and several indexes were computed in order to distinguish between static and dynamic countries. Also, an econometric structural change model was used to quantify the influence of competitiveness on changes in six tourism variables (GDP, employment, consumption, exports, local spending and investment). Results show that improving competitiveness has a positive effect on most of the tourism variables discussed.