Hierarchical Cluster Analysis of Tourism for Mexico and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Countries

Abstract

Tourism has become an important industry for most of the economies, especially for non industrialized countries where it represent the main source of income. This paper focuses on the analysis of 14 competitiveness tourism factors for 20 country members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which represents the most dynamic region in the world according to its participation on the global GDP and international trade, highlighting the performance of Mexico and doing a benchmark with the rest of APEC countries. The authors analyze secondary data from the Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index to create clusters and then multidimensional scaling techniques were employed for detecting the more or less effective determinants of destination competitiveness.