On Measuring Tourism Productivity

Abstract

This paper presents a productivity measure for the tourism industry. It demonstrates the value of the Luenberger productivity indicator, which is based on the directional distance function, for analyzing productivity between two periods. This indicator can be decomposed into two components: efficiency change and technological change. In order to illustrate this, productivity in the French tourism sector between 2000 and 2003 is analyzed. The study focuses on tourism receipts by looking at the number of bed-nights in hotels and campsites based on tourist nationality.

Keywords:

• directional distance function
• Luenberger productivity indicator
• tourism receipts
• bed-nights

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the most constructive remarks of Walter Briec and the two anonymous referees. Obviously, the author remains solely responsible for any residual shortcomings.

Notes

¹See Chambers et al. (1996b) for an application of this indicator to the APEC countries.

²The Asian continent has been considered because more precise data are not available. In this study, the term Asia denotes all the countries in the continent, with the exception of Japan, which has been treated separately.

³See Pizam & Mansfeld (1999) for an overview of tourist behavior.

⁴Indeed, in tourism demand theory, when tourist expenditure is the dependent variable it is an increasing function of income; see Sinclair & Stabler (1997) for details.

⁵All the calculi are programmed in Mathematica language with the Mathematica 5.0 software. The author has considered the direction g = (1, 1).

⁶The difference in changes obtained by the two indicators has not been estimated here because they are already known. See Boussemart et al. (2003) for more details about comparisons between the Luenberger and the Malmquist productivity indices and Managi (2003) for an application.

⁷Hwang & Chang (2003) have proposed this analysis for Taiwan by using data envelopment analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicolas Peypoch

E-mail: [email protected]