FACTORS OF TOURISM’S COMPETITIVENESS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION COUNTRIES

Tourism is one of the most rapidly blossoming sectors of economy and its economic and social significance is expressed both in numbers (share in GNP, employment) and in a range of as important uncountable characteristics like expansion of a region, more intense development, building the spirit of local communities, actions preventing social exclusion or education of future generations for state progress. A number of countries, provinces and regions have achieved wellrounded social and economic growth by developing tourist economies and a range of necessary supporting measures, including complementary infrastructure, active and well-educated society by organising adequate living standards and fulfilling basic social requirements, etc. It is therefore important to determine factors that improve competitiveness of tourism to maximum extent. The objective of this paper is to evaluate dependences between competitiveness of the European Union member states and selected factors determining competitiveness of tourism in these states. A set of factors determining competitiveness of tourism is introduced, that is, capacity of tourist accommodation establishments, arrivals at tourist accommodation establishments, average expenditure of tourism trips (1 night or over) – domestic trips, average expenditure of tourism trips (1 night or over) – outbound trips, tourism domestic trips (1 night or over), tourism outbound trips (1 night or over) and their impact on levels of competitiveness is determined. Considerable geographical variation of availability of accommodation establishments in the European Union member states and high, statistically significance correlations between availability of accommodation establishments and numbers of tourists arriving in a given states and between competitiveness of the EU states and tourism expenditure are identified.