CLUSTERING SILK ROAD COUNTRIES BASED ON COMPETITIVENESS FACTORS IN TOURISM INDUSTRY - Tourism in Central Asia: Cultural Potential and Challenges - page 210

this analysis, we used the World Economic Forum's (WEF) classification
of Travel & Tourism Competitiveness factors to examine resources that
are expected to influence sustainable competition in the industry. WEF's
classification consists of three sub indexes and 14 factors that measure
these subindexes, as indicated below:
• T&T regulatory framework
• (Policy rules and regulations, Environmental sustainability, Safety
and security, Health and hygiene, Prioritization of Travel & Tourism)
• T&T business environment and infrastructure
• (Air transport infrastructure, Ground transport infrastructure, Tour-
ism infrastructure, Information and Communication Technology
(ICT) infrastructure, Price competitiveness in the T&T industry)
• T&T human, cultural, and natural resources
• (Human resources, Education and training, Availability of qualified
labor, Affinity for Travel & Tourism, Natural resources, Cultural re-
sources).
METHODOLOGY AND FINDINGS
In this section of the chapter, to be able to classify Silk Road countries, we
benefited from the United Nations World Tourism Organization's (UN-
WTO) Silk Road Action Plan for the years 2012-2013. This report in-
cludes the list of Silk Road Countries, which consists of 28 countries: Al-
bania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, DPR Korea, Egypt,
Georgia, Greece, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyztan,
Mongolia, Pakistan, Republic of Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Ta-
jikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Although there
are 28 countries included in this list, we used the data for 23 countries
and excluded the remaining five because of lack of data. Countries that
are excluded from the list are DPR Korea, Iran, Iraq, Turkmenistan, and
Uzbekistan.
For the 23 countries, we first employed a cluster analysis to examine
how they will be clustered and which T&T Competitiveness Index pillars
would contribute to classify each cluster. The reason for cluster analysis
is that we would like to reveal the position of each Silk Road country as a
member of a cluster. Second, we employed t-test analyzes to portray the
difference of each cluster's performance on T&T Competitiveness Index