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

Tiziana Cuccia, Calogero Guccio () and Ilde Rizzo

No AWP-04-2013, ACEI Working Paper Series from Association for Cultural Economics International

Abstract: This paper analyses the role of tourism in the enhancement of local development focusing on the role of UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) as attractor of tourism demand. It aims at evaluating the performance of the Italian regions as tourism destinations in 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 correlated to the technical efficiency of tourist destinations. 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 tourist destinations and therefore to foster local development.

Keywords: Cultural Heritage; Tourism; Non-parametric methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D24 L83 O18 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2013-10, Revised 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul, nep-eff and nep-tur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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