EFFICIENCY AND PRODUCTIVITY OF ITALIAN TOURIST DESTINATIONS: A QUANTITATIVE ESTIMATION BASED ON DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS (DEA) AND THE MALMQUIST INDEX

The paper enrich the tourism literature by focussing on destination competitiveness and by providing a measure of competitiveness at regional level in terms of technical efficiency and total factor productivity.The main aim is to investigate whether tourist destinations operate efficiently; by using a non parametric method the paper assesses production frontiers and efficiency coefficients of alternative tourist destinations. Moreover the Malmquist productivity approach is used to measure the efficiency change of Italian regions between 1998 and 2001.