Measuring Convergence in Tourism Competitiveness of Natural and Cultural Resources: A Case of the Balkans and Eastern Europe

Abstract

The publication The Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report encompasses the latest data on the travel and tourism competitiveness. Given that this report is a leading product of the World Economic Forum platform, it serves as a strategic benchmark for future policy implementation. Natural and cultural resources are significant in explaining tourism competitiveness. The empirical study in this paper is based on the two-step process of measuring convergence of tourism competitiveness. The first step illustrates the values of competitiveness of natural and cultural resources for two groups of European countries: the Balkans and Eastern Europe and five high-ranking European countries in the field of cultural tourism. The second part applies the entropy method for measuring convergence of competitiveness of this group of countries. For analysing tourism competitiveness in these two groups of countries, ten indicators were used: five for natural resources and five for cultural resources. The results show that natural and cultural resources are the critical drivers of competitiveness and represent the determinants of tourism performance in the future.