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

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.