Modelling the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index 2015

Abstract

The Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index measures the factors and policies that make attractive the development of the tourism sector in different countries, providing rankings. The World Economic Forum started its publication in 2007. In this sense, some academics such as Mazanec and Ring (2011) criticized the arbitrary approach of assigning equal weighting to the three subindexes and 13 pillars in order to form this index and have estimated several models for the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index. Their results present problems of multicollinearity and implausible negative sign for natural resources, among other results. However, this index changed in 2015, assigning again equal weighting to the four subindexes and 14 pillars. This work finished in 2015 constitutes modifications of the PLS-SEM model published by Mazanec and Ring in 2011. Two complementary partial least squares structural equation models tested the hypotheses of the postulated positive relationship between each pillar and this tourism competitiveness index. Our models consider other different nomograms trying mainly to avoid the problem of multicollinearity and to clarify the importance of the pillars in the index composition. In one of the models, the pillars with the greatest weight in tourism competitiveness are cultural resources and business travel and natural resources, according to the main competitiveness destinations models reviewed. In the other model, only two pillars human resources and TICs formed an exogenous composite explaining the competitiveness index’s variance. However, further research should be implemented on how to form the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness index.