The notion and measurement of destination competitiveness have received increasing attention in the economics literature on tourism. The reason for this emerges from both the growing economic importance of the tourist sector and the increasing competition in the tourist market resulting from the transition from mass tourism to a new age of tourism that calls for a tailor-made approach to the specific attitudes and needs of tourists. The central subject of this paper – inspired by the conceptual competitiveness model developed by Crouch and Ritchie – concerns the efficiency of tourist site destinations. Using a data set of 103 Italian regions for 2001, an economic efficiency analysis is carried out, based on a production frontier approach. The study deploys a measure of tourist site competitiveness in terms of its technical efficiency using parametric and non-parametric methods, a stochastic production function and data envelopment analysis, respectively.
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