Tourism specialization and world heritage in Latin America and the Caribbean

ELIAS SILVINA; LEONARDI VIVIANA

La Plata

Congreso; Conference of IATE; 2019

Universidad Nacional de la Plata

The relationship between tourism and the registration of a place as a world heritage, both tangible and intangible, is presented as an aspect of interest for the cultural tourism literature. In many cases, the inclusion of places in these listings entails a significant increase, especially in international visitors, creating a strong relationship between tourism and the World Heritage Sites (WHS) (Tucker & Emge, 2010; Tucker and Carnegie, 2014; Su and Lin, 2014; Porto, Rucci & Ciaschi, 2017; Leonardi, Elías & Tortul, 2018). This study aims to analyze the impact that the nomination of sites to be included in the UNESCO World Heritage List has on a country. According to Leonardi et al. (2018), we work with a panel of data of 32 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean for the 1995-2017 period. We try to determine if there are differences in the nomination of the heritage site according to the type of tourist destination. Therefore, a specialization index is introduced in the analysis indicating whether or not the country is specialized in tourism. The degree of tourism specialization is defined in two ways: as the share of international tourism receipts in the GDP (Brau, Lanza & Pigliaru, 2004, 2007; Adamou & Clerides, 2010) and alternatively as the number of international tourist arrivals to the local population (Figini & Vici, 2010; De Vita & Kyaw, 2016). According to the index, ?tourism countries? are those countries with a degree of tourism specialization greater than or equal to 10% over the period in consideration. Then, the countries are divided into ?non-tourism? to test if the inclusion of places in the UNESCO list entails differences in the increase of international visitors in both groups.