A Factor Analysis of the Tourism in the Mexican Province of Michoacan

Abstract

The tourism is a key branch in the world wide economy nowadays, and revenues account for one third of total income in the world. Many nations are trying to improve their tourism sector attracting more tourists every year in order to impact social welfare. This study addresses two research questions: (1) What are the factors that impact on tourism sector? and (2) Does the tourism really impact on social welfare of the communities? The objectives of this work are to analyze the variables that impact on the tourism in the Mexican providence of Michoacan and also to find out if the tourism sector is impacting on social welfare of the province, with the propose of answering this questions 41 variables were selected being 63 municipalities of Michoacan province in the case of study. Analysis Factorial of Correspondences (AFC) through the analysis of principal components methodology is employed in this article. The analysis is divided into five phases: (1) reliability testing; (2) the calculation of a matrix that expresses the joint variability of the variables; (3) extraction of the optimal number of factors; (4) the rotation of solutions for the ease of interpretation; and (5) the estimation of the scores graphically. The results showed that the variables that impact on tourism are several the most representative tourism infrastructure and complementary services restaurants, lodging with category five- and four- star travel, visitors foreign share of the Economic Active Population (EAP) in the tertiary sector, percentage of EAP women, percentage of economically active men and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita among others. However the analysis of the Human Development Index (HDI) is not associated with the tourism variables.