Ranking world tourist destinations with a composite indicator of competitiveness: To weigh or not to weigh?

This paper contributes a weighted composite indicator of competitiveness for 136 world tourist destinations. To that end, Data Envelopment Analysis and Multi-Criteria-Decision-Making techniques are used with raw indicators from the 2017 edition of the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum (WEF). An outstanding feature of our approach is that weights are endogenously generated. Furthermore, the role played by several variables in tourism competitiveness is assessed using truncated regression and bootstrapping. The ranking of world tourist destinations produced by our weighted composite indicator of competitiveness is, however, fairly similar to that derived from the unweighted indicator provided by the WEF. Furthermore, we also find that several economic, geographical, cultural and political features are significant determinants of the competitiveness of tourist destinations.