Testing Correlations on Tourism Competitiveness in the EU

Abstract

This paper proposes an analysis of the tourism competitiveness and of the correlations between its components and the general country competitiveness, tourism-specific macroeconomic indicators, international tourism flows- for EU member states. To achieve this objective, the authors use secondary data from the World Economic Forum (Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index, Global Competitiveness Index) and World Travel and Tourism Council (governmental investments, capital investments, international tourism receipts, and expenditures). The main results show that there is a direct correlation between visitor exports, on the one hand, and tourism competitiveness index, in general, respectively with natural, cultural and business resources, in particular, for the EU countries.

Keywords

• tourism competitiveness
• global competitiveness
• tourism exports
• european union