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The article involves a study along the line of performance analysis of tourist destinations, yet taking the regions as territorial units and cultural tourism as a tourist flow to be explored. The aim of this study is therefore to evaluate the technical efficiency of regions in attracting greater flows of cultural tourism considering their own cultural resources available in the medium term. The analysis will be carried out at a regional disaggregation level in Spain, and one hypothetical production function will be designed to link cultural resources and demand. We adopt a two-stage procedure to evaluate regional efficiency as cultural destinations: first, measuring performance by non-parametric methods; and second, analysing how other external variables might determine these efficiency ratios. In this case, we consider indicators representing reputation, accessibility, the omnivorous nature of cultural tourism as well as the scope to the regional cultural sector. The findings of this research have implications for economic development and regional disparity analysis and may also prove to be of potential interest vis-à-vis economic policy.

The aim of this work is to posit a model to evaluate the efficiency of a system of urban public libraries and to examine the impact of certain contextual variables on the level of performance. We take the System of Public Libraries in the city of Medellin (Colombia) as a case study and consider a production function which displays three main characteristics. First, it is a complete production function which spans the different activities undertaken by these institutions, not only the one that identifies it with its function as a repository of knowledge. Second, there is the production function in stages, which allows us to distinguish between the various activities controlled by management from those coproduced with users, together with the link between the two. The third is a production function which takes into account temporal interdependence relations by identifying quasi-fixed inputs that remain for the provision of the service over time. This then allows us to analyse how efficiency evolves during the period in question. Efficiency evaluation is carried out by employing a dynamicnetwork-DEA model and we also apply truncated bootstrap regression to estimate the effect of certain contextual variables on library efficiency. The results evidence a growing trend in the efficiency indices, with values that are slightly more favourable in the second stage of service provision than in the stage focusing on managing the cultural programme. Factors such as the level of education, population density, youthfulness, and safety are seen to positively affect library performance, particularly in the second stage vis-à-vis the public.

We evaluate tourist efficiency in Latin‐America and the Caribbean, an area of growing interest in international tourism. We take 17 countries with homogeneous information for 2011–2015 and apply a two‐stage conditioned evaluation. We gauge efficiency using data envelopment analysis of a production function to maximize overnight stays given tourist resources and estimate the impact of external factors for infrastructures, cultural and natural resources, level of development, and so forth. We use a double bootstrap procedure to correct bias in efficiency ratios and serial correlation with second stage variables. We find that countries operate below their possibilities when attracting international tourism. The most efficient are in the Caribbean and Mexico, who specialize in sun and sand tourism. There is evidence that cultural resources and transport infrastructure improve performance. We find the opposite for natural resources and other infrastructures. This research furthers our knowledge of tourist efficiency analysis in an area where such studies remain scarce.

This work involves undertaking a reappraisal of the Seven Deadly Sins in order to construct synthetic indicators of well-being aimed at measuring spatial economic disparities and their link to economic development. The Seven Deadly Sins constitute a way of describing vices vis-à-vis Christian moral education. Yet they might also be viewed as general norms of social behaviour and interpreted today as notions related to the concept of well-being. For example, the level of concentration of wealth (greed), sustainability of resources (gluttony), safety index (wrath), problems adapting to the labour market or workplace absenteeism (sloth), etc. The Seven Deadly Sins have also yielded emblematic examples of artistic iconography and cultural production. How they are perceived and expressed may also differ depending on each group's cultural idiosyncrasy, in the sense of a series of beliefs and attitudes forged over the centuries. Based on these premises, the current work first seeks to compile variables that reflect each conceptual dimension so as to later construct a synthetic indicator of well-being with territorial disaggregation. This enables us to explore spatial disparities and the extent to which they relate to economic development. This is applied to a group of countries in the European Union with NUTS 2 territorial disaggregation (regions). The sources of information are basically Eurostat. The method involves applying Data Envelopment Analysis to construct the synthetic indicator, and spatial econometrics to pinpoint spatial dependence effects.