A New Spatial Shift-Share Decomposition: An Application to Tourism Competitiveness in Italian Regions

Abstract

The paper proposes a new version of spatial shift-share decomposition to improve on the various approaches to conventional shift-share analysis found in the literature. The novelty of our proposal is that it enables researchers to assess spatial competitiveness effects controlling for the influence of industrial specialization at both regional and neighborhood level. This new version is applied to inbound tourism in Italian regions and enables us to identify the best and worst performers. Our empirical results identify favorable scenarios in some areas of the country, such as Sardinia as well as regional advantage in a sizeable number of well-known destinations.