Touristic competitiveness of European Union countries

Artykuł recenzowany / peer-reviewed articleThe 20th century was a period of turbulent socio-economic changes, which resulted in tourism becoming one of the fastest developing areas of life. In contemporary world economy, competitiveness is the essential mechanism of development. Since the beginning of the 1980s, new concepts of competitiveness have caused increased interest in the competitiveness of regions. Competitiveness is the ability to be successful in economic competition. Competition in regions should be understood as their ability to achieve for themselves - as opposed to for other regions – the best possible position in the range of regions competing for attracting new development initiatives to their territories. Every region has a competitive advantage which results from its natural conditions or historical accumulation of resources. Europe is the main receptive area of the world. Countries of the European Union are Europe’s dominant tourist destination. This attempt at evaluating the tourist competitiveness of the EU countries has been based on indices concerning the touristic functionality of the studied countries and conducted according to the Julian Perkal method, which makes it possible to calculate the synthetic index of evaluating the studied phenomenon according to its standardized features. In the ranking of countries that have a noticeable competitive advantage, based on absolute features, the fi rst position is occupied by Spain, followed by Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The synthetic Wi indices, calculated on the basis of relative features, have indicated countries with a dominant touristic function, such as Malta, Cyprus, Greece, Austria and Luxembourg. For many EU countries tourism is the engine behind their economic development