FACTORS OF GLOBAL CONNECTIVITY IN ANTALYA'S TOURISM

It is clear that some tourism clusters are more successful than others. While the endogenous characteristics of successful clusters have in the past been well documented, recent literature has rather focused upon the importance of the global integration of clusters and the increased global connectivity of the companies within them. Using global connectivity indicators, this paper explores the importance of global links to companies in 10 tourism clusters in the Antalya metropolitan region; and defines the particular factors that are most influential by drawing upon econometric data garnered from interview results. The findings of the case study firstly revealed that the clusters containing more globally connected companies experienced faster growth in terms of employment than those that are less globally connected; while the econometric models have shown that the level of global connectivity of a company is related to its size, its vertical relations with different types of firms, and its horizontal relations with similar firms within the same cluster. While these findings on the whole verify past debates in literature, the empirical study offers contradicting evidence that being in a large cluster may not affect a firm's global connectivity, and is not necessarily related to its creative capacity.