What is it about?

The first decade of the present century has been characterized by several economic shocks such as the 2008 financial crisis. In this data article we present the annual percentage growth rates of the main tourism indicators in the world's top tourist destinations: the United States, China, France, Spain, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany, Turkey, Mexico and Austria. We use data from the Compendium of Tourism Statistics provided by the World Tourism Organization (http://www2.unwto.org/content/data-0). Data include the annual number of international overnight visitors, total expenditure, total number of rooms, and the percentage of the occupancy rates from 2000 to 2010.

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Why is it important?

It has been demonstrated that the dynamics of growth in the tourism industry pose different challenges to each destination in the previous study “Positioning and clustering of the world's top tourist destinations by means of dimensionality reduction techniques for categorical data” (Claveria and Poluzzi, 2016). We provide a descriptive analysis of the variables over the period comprised between 2000 and 2010. We complement the analysis by graphing the evolution of the main variables so as to visually represent the co-movements between tourism variables and economic growth.

Perspectives

As pointed out by Song et al. (2012), one of the problems with the existing tourism literature is the omission of economic indicators and the lack of attention paid to economic return. With the aim of covering this deficit, in this study we incorporate economic information. We use the annual percentage growth rates of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and of total inbound expenditure over GDP. By using annual percentage growth rates instead of levels, we avoid the issues derived from working with non-stationary time series, since most tourism variables are non-stationary due to the steady growth in tourism (Chu et al., 2014).

Oscar Claveria
AQR-IREA, Univeristy of Barcelona

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This page is a summary of: Tourism trends in the world׳s main destinations before and after the 2008 financial crisis using UNWTO official data, Data in Brief, June 2016, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.dib.2016.03.043.
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