Evaluating destinations' efforts to improve sustainability in tourism using the inter-temporal decomposition of a composite indicator

Abstract

Sustainable tourism indicators are instruments for measuring tourism sustainability, widely used in the planning and decision-making processes. For this measurement, in recent decades composite indicators have been proposed that provide dynamic evaluations to assess the progress that each destination registers towards more sustainable situations. However, the measures proposed so far do not allow the evaluation of each destination's own effort or the effectiveness of the measures put in place, because the evaluation they provide depends on the decisions made when adding information (weighting, reference situations...). In this study, a dynamic measure of sustainable tourism is proposed, which, through the intertemporal decomposition of a global indicator with multiplicative aggregation, assesses the effort that each destination makes to improve its sustainability situation. The aggregation procedure is carried out in two stages. In the first one, a compensatory synthetic indicator is obtained for each aspect using a weighting scheme determined from information and dispersion criteria. In a second phase, the global composite indicator is obtained with a multiplicative aggregation, setting unique and common weights for all destinations through DEA models and using different benchmarks for each type of destination, in order to take into account their different starting situations.