Italian UNESCO Sites and the Performance of Tourist Destinations at the Regional Level

This paper analyses the role of tourism in the enhancement of local development, focusing on the role of UNESCO World Heritage List (WHL) as a factor that improvesthe competitiveness of a region as a tourism destination. Basing on the results of theData Envelopment Analysis (DEA) obtained by Cuccia et al. (2013), the paper aims toevaluate the determinants of the performance of the Italian regions as tourism destinations(TDs) in the period 1995-2010. A robust semi-parametric regression is employedto assess the impact of the WHL inscription on the efficiency of TDs in the short and inthe long term. The empirical results show that, controlling for several environmental factors,the presence of UNESCO sites is negatively correlated to the technical efficiencyof tourist destinations. Our explanation for such a result is that WHL inscription raisesexpectations, which lead to investments, which are not met by an equivalent increase oftourism flows: this has to be taken in account by policy-makers in the design of the localstrategies to promote tourist destinations and therefore to foster local development.