Above: Barbados (CJ Photo)
By the Caribbean Journal staff
What’s the most competitive tourism economy in the Caribbean?
It’s Barbados, according to the latest edition of the World Economic Forum’s Travel and Tourism Competitiveness report.
The report, which covers 141 economies in the $7 trillion travel global sector, is published every two years.
And while Barbados is not the most-visited destination in the Caribbean (an honor that belongs to the Dominican Republic), it got the top spot due to strong rankings on its prioritization of travel and tourism, environmental sustainability and ground and port infrastructure, among other categories.
The report analyzes economies on a total of 14 different “pillars” organized into four subindexes: Enabling Environment, Travel and Tourism Policy and Enabling Conditions, Infrastructure and Natural and Cultural Resources.
The pillars, which included everything from country brand strategy rating to the reliability of police services, are then calculated based on data from the WEF’s Executive Opinion Survey and other quantitative data.
The next-highest ranked Caribbean economy was Puerto Rico at 55th in the world, followed by Trinidad and Tobago (69), Jamaica (76), the Dominican Republic (81) Suriname (101), Guyana (104) and Haiti (133).
Spain and France were the world’s first and second-ranked countries.
As is typical of World Economic Forum reports, it did not include a number of the Caribbean’s smaller-population countries.