Does UNESCO inscription affect the performance of tourism destinations? A regional perspective

Abstract eng:
The article explores the role of UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) as attractor of tourism demandand in the enhancement Tourism Destinations (TD) competitiveness. It aims at evaluating the performance of the Italian regions as TDin the period 1995-2010, using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) two-stage approach. In the first stage the efficiency scores are calculated using a smoothed DEA bootstrap procedure to generate unbiased technical efficiency estimates. In the second stage a robust semi-parametric regression is employed to assess the impact of the WHL inscription on the efficiency of tourism destinations in the short and in the long term. The empirical results show that, controlling for several environmental factors, the presence of UNESCO sites is negatively associated to the technical efficiency of TD. Our explanation for such a result is that WHL inscription raises expectations which are not met by an equivalent increase of tourism flows: this has to be taken in account by policy-makers in the design of the local strategies to promote TDscompetitiveness.

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