**3.1. Indicators of the World Travel and Tourism Council**

In 2001, the WTTC, in collaboration with the Christel DeHaan Tourism and Travel Research Institute (TTRI) of the University of Nottingham, put into practice a Competitiveness Monitor (CM), with 65 tourism competitiveness indicators classified into eight dimensions (competi‐ tiveness in prices, human tourism, infrastructure, environment, technology, opening tourism, social development and human resources), to measure the degree of tourism competitiveness of almost 200 countries, by means of the production of multi-variant reference indicators [10]. The methodology used began with the standardisation of 23 previously selected indicators, calculating the standardised value (*yij*) for each of them.

$$\mathcal{Y}\_{\mathcal{Y}} = \frac{\mathbf{x}\_{\mathcal{Y}} - \min\left(\mathbf{x}\_{\mathcal{Y}}\right)}{\max\left(\mathbf{x}\_{\mathcal{Y}}\right) - \min\left(\mathbf{x}\_{\mathcal{Y}}\right)}$$

The indicators vary between 0 and 1; with the 1 value corresponding to countries with the maximum value of the indicator, and 0 to the countries with the minimum value. In the case that the relationship between the indicator and the degree of competitiveness is inverse, a procedure of inverse standardisation is applied.

$$\mathcal{Y}\_{\boldsymbol{\theta}} = \frac{\max\left(\boldsymbol{x}\_{\boldsymbol{\theta}}\right) - \boldsymbol{x}\_{\boldsymbol{\theta}}}{\max\left(\boldsymbol{x}\_{\boldsymbol{\theta}}\right) - \min\left(\boldsymbol{x}\_{\boldsymbol{\theta}}\right)}$$

Once the indicators are standardised, an aggregate index of the eight dimensions of the previously defined competitiveness is defined. This index is an arithmetic mean of the standardised values of the indicators of each dimension:

$$\mathcal{S}\_i^{(k)} = \frac{\sum\_{j=1}^{\pi} \nu\_{ji}}{m}$$

where *Si* (*k* ) is the value taken in country *i* with aggregate indicator from the group *k*, which is made up of *m* simple indicators; that is, superscript k (k = 1, 2,…, 8) reflects eight dimensions and *m* the number of indicators necessary to measure them.

The simple indicators that comprise each aggregated indicator are shown in **Table 2**.



**Table 2.** WTTC indicators of competitiveness.

This methodology, in spite of obtaining eight aggregate indices, does not synthesise all the information in a single competitiveness index, because each of the eight aggregate indices corresponds to a different competitive dimension. In general, two disadvantages are attributed to it: i) the index *Si* (*k* ) does not use all the indicators available due to the deficit of statistical information on them, many countries being excluded from the global calculation; and ii), each *Si* (*k* ) is obtained as a simple sum of the standardised indicators, without the indicators having been weighted in the calculation of the aggregate indices.

With the aim of constructing a weighted aggregate index of tourism competitiveness, in [30] a definition is given for the aggregate index *Zi* for each dimension (*I*), from the weighted average of the indicators proposed by the WTTC. The weight (*ω*)of each of these is obtained by means of a confirmatory factor analysis, with those weights or weightings being the slopes of the confirmatory factor analysis: *Zi* = ∑ *k*=1 8 *ω<sup>k</sup> Ii* (*k* ) .

It is possible to say that, in [30], the simple arithmetic mean is used in the construction of the indicators of the groups, where as for the construction of the synthetic indicator, they use the weighted mean, where the weightings are constructed from the value of the slopes of the confirming factorial analysis. The weights or weightings of the indicators obtained in [30] were as follows: Technology (0.220), Social Indicator (0.217), Human Resources (0.153), Price (0.147), Opening (0.126), Infrastructure (0.101), Human Factor (0.033) and Environment (0.003). From this synthetic indicator, in [30] it was concluded that the more competitive tourism destinations were, in sequence, the following: The United States, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Australia.

This proposal, although allowing a comparison to be made between a large number of countries, presents the following two main disadvantages: one resides in the results them‐ selves, because, with the exception of the United States, none of the other countries indicated as the most competitive from the tourism point of view, appear in the list of the most visited countries of the world; the other is that it grants a very secondary role to the environmental factor [25]. Nevertheless, numerous studies, such as those of [2,31], indicate natural and environmental resources as one of the main attractions of a destination.
