Tourist spending and productivity of economy in OECD countries – research on perspectives of sustainable tourism

Tourism represents the sector of services which is developing the most considerably and dynamically. However, its development is influenced by: trends in globalization, process of demographic aging, economic parameters, geographical conditions of a country, consumers, and other aspects. The following aspects contribute to its development: new destinations, markets, innovative activities in service sector, and also technological development. Tourism plays a significant economic role in a process of sustainable regional development, where it helps to develop low-growth regions. Monitoring and quantification of tourism outputs is a very complicated process. There also absents a quality database, which complicates a quantification of sector’s efficiency and a creation of national and international benchmarking indicators that inform of sustainable tourism level. These aspects demand a realization of multi-dimensional analyses, which would examine causal relations between tourism factors and economic parameters of a country. The study’s motivation was driven by all of the above-mentioned facts. It aims at researching an influence of tourism spending on OECD countries’ productivity. Consequently, it evaluates their potential of the sector’s sustainability. Multiple analytical procedures, which were determined by database availability, were performed in order to achieve the, research aim. The following analyses were performed besides the descriptive statistics: variance analysis of researched variables between individual years and OECD countries, context analysis, regression and cluster analyses. There were analysed 5 variables that characterize individual types of tourist spending: Business Tourism Spending, Domestic Tourism Spending, Leisure Tourism Spending, Outbound Travel & Tourism Expenditure , Visitor Exports (Foreign Spending) and one variable that characterizes productivity during 2010 – 2018 for all OECD countries. Spending variables were standardized per 1,000 inhabitants of a given country and productivity was measured by GDP per capita, while both groups of variables were provided in USD (fair value). The analyses’ results provided interesting findings. The regression models’ outputs confirmed an influence of tourist spending on a country’s productivity. All variables that indicate spending are significant. The cluster analysis’s results allowed a selection of countries into four groups. There is two huge clusters and other two clusters represent only one countries in specific cluster. Luxemburg and Iceland give us different values than countries in other clusters. The countries with higher rank are as follows: Australia (AUS), Austria (AUT), Belgium (BEL), Canada (CAN), Germany (DEU), Denmark (DNK), Finland (FIN), France (FRA), Unites Kingdom (GBR), Switzerland (CHE), Ireland (IRL), Italy (ITA), Netherland (NLD), Norway (NOR), New Zealand (NZL), Sweden (SWE), United States (USA), Island (ISL) and Luxembourg (LUX). On the other hand, the countries with lower rank are as follows: Czech Republic CZE, Spain (ESP), Estonia (EST), Greece (GRC), Hungary (HUN), Chile (CHL), Israel (ISR), Japan (JPN), Korea (KOR), Lithuania (LTU), Latvia (LVA), Mexico (MEX), Poland (POL), Portugal (PRT), Slovak Republic (SVK), Slovenia (SVN) and Turkey (TUR). These findings provide a space for a deeper research of effect between determinants of tourism development and economic indicators, while they enable to reveal a space for a growth of countries’ productivity that would provide a sustainability in tourism sector.