Tourism competitiveness of countries as the basis for sustainable development: methodology and estimation results

The article is devoted to the development and testing of methodology for tourism competitiveness estimation of coun- tries based on open data as a basic component of sustainable tourism development. The relevance of the study is in the fact that insufficient attention is paid to the problem of research despite a large diversity of views on sustainable tourism development. The reasons for this are the difficulty of the issue, poor availability of sufficient information, the large amount of work in data processing, and others. Methodology of tourism competitiveness estimation of countries is the research subject. The hypothesis of the study is the following: it is possible to identify and estimate the tourism competitiveness of countries with the help of developed technique. In the first part of the article the author discusses the main organizations and their approaches to research problems: UNWTO, “World Travel & Tourism Council” and “World Economic Forum”. In the second part of the article the author presents a methodology for estimation, which is aimed at obtaining the integral index, consisting of 4 blocks and 21 sub-blocks, which operates 217 estimation indicators for 204 countries of the world. The results of the estimation are presented in maps. Mathematics and statistics, GIS, neural analysis, comparison, abstraction and modeling, etc are the main methods of the study. The author has used systematic, integrated, geographic and situational approaches. Developedandtestedmethodologyforcompetitivenessestimationofthecountries'tourismindustryistheresultofthe study,possessingbothmethodologicalandpracticalsignificance.Inthereflectiontheauthorshowstheadvantagesand disadvantagesoftheproposedmethodology. Keywords:tourismattraction,tourismcompetitivenessofthecountriesintheworld,thetourismcompetitivenessindex ofthecountriesintheworld,theindicatorsoftourismcompetitivenessindexofthecountriesintheworld,themethod- ologyfortourismcompetitivenessofthecountriesintheworld,tourismsector,tourismavailability,tourismconditions.