**1. Introduction**

The attraction or the motivation by which individuals decide to go to certain destinations or others, has inspired the study of tourism competitiveness. Among the theoretical studies, it is possible to highlight the models of [1–4]. The studies of [5–9] can be mentioned among the empirical. In these studies, it is shown that there is no single determining factor of tourism attraction, but that tourism competitiveness is related to the sum of many factors. Consequent‐ ly, various indicators have been developed that attempt to summarise the competitiveness of the destination by a number. Basically, several elements are included in these indicators, which are found with various methodologies [10]. Among them are those related to the provision of physical resources or those *inherited* from the past.

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The interest of these analyses is focused on determining which factors influence the growth of tourism. Concurrently to these studies, other economists have focused their interest on the empirical analysis of the relationship between tourism and growth. Initially, these analyses were focused on the empirical confirmation of the so-called *tourism-led growth* (TLG) hypoth‐ esis, since [11] made the first empirical study on the causal relationships between both variables. Other, more recent, studies put emphasis on knowing through what mechanism, or how or in what quantity, tourism generates economic growth, and they empirically analyse the relationship between tourism and economic growth, including tourism demand variables in the production functions, because as [12] affirms, it is necessary to consider other productive factors when the relationship between tourism activity and economic growth is analysed.

This study reviews the theories relating to competitiveness and the indicators used for its measurement on the one hand, and the studies that relate tourism and growth on the other, with the purpose of establishing the links that exist between both concepts. This enables a model to be defined in which some factors that affect tourism competitiveness, combine with capital and labour to determine economic growth. Those factors are included in this study, under the name of *inherited* tourism resources.

With this objective, the present study is structured as follows. After this introduction, the competitiveness models are reviewed in Section 2, including tourism competitiveness. In Section 3, a review is made of the international indicators used to make estimations of tourism competitiveness. In Section 4, a review is made of the studies that analyse economic growth and tourism, putting emphasis on the limitations or difficulties of these models and their relationship to tourism competitiveness. This analysis allows the definition of an alternative model of study, which includes the concept of inherited tourism resource. Finally, conclusions are made in Section 5.
