The Spanish Tourism Sector: Digital Transformation and Total Factor Productivity

The primary purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between TFP growth and ICT use. It also examines the number of people within the firm devoted to R&D and the usage of a website for large firms and SMEs in the Spanish tourism sector from 2011 to 2017. There are 581 companies in the sample, with the information coming from SABI and a total of 4067 observations. The TFP estimation approach of J. Levinsohn and Petrin (2003) and the SEM method were used for data processing. The research has revealed that non-border enterprises have a greater average growth rate than frontier firms, and tourism firms in Spain are highly productive in terms of TFP. Second, the study demonstrates the relationship between TFP growth and investment in R&D, ICT use, and R&D personnel. This positive relationship between technological development and economic growth demonstrates that, in terms of policy implications, administrations must maintain the policies that have facilitated this success, despite the need for improvements in the implementation of digitization policies, particularly in SMBs.