CLUSTERING OF THE LEAST DEVELOPED COUNTRIES BY THE TOURISM ECONOMIC IMPACT ANALYSIS

Tourism in general is one of the most important socio-economic sectors of our time. From the leisure activity reserved for the privileged few, tourism become the global movement participated in by billions of people across the world, including the developing world. This paper aims to analyze the impact of tourism in the group of the least developed countries with focus on the specific data components, as contribution of tourism to the gross domestic product, visitor exports, domestic spending, government spending, internal tourism consumption, business and leisure spending or capital investments. For this purpose, we use the hierarchical cluster analysis and we analyze the countries by the different indicators from the supply and demand point of view. The article concludes that for many of the least developed countries tourism has becomearelevantsector of the national economy.