Tourism competitiveness index of the Asia-Pacific region through consistency analysis

The world’s economy shifts to a more competitive environment as globalization expands and countries have to adjust by making decisions to improve their competitiveness in all sectors. The Travel and Tourism Report, a useful tool facilitating policy-making and business decisions, allows entities to envision their ranking in the face of the travel and tourism through the creation of a competitiveness index. Focusing on Asia and the Pacific, this paper intends to investigate internal consistency of the constructs based on data analysis techniques such as correlation and reliability, essentials to broader acceptance of the index. The results indicate that high linear association between index and pillars leads ultimately to good level of consistency and highlight the lack of relationship between overall consistency and inter-class consistency. It is suggested to pay close attention to unidimensionality of constructs and inter-relation between variables while building an indicator system as it increases its reliability.