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.
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. (Citation1996b) 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 Citation(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 Citation(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. Citation(2003) for more details about comparisons between the Luenberger and the Malmquist productivity indices and Managi Citation(2003) for an application.
7Hwang & Chang Citation(2003) have proposed this analysis for Taiwan by using data envelopment analysis.