CLUSTERING SILK ROAD COUNTRIES BASED ON COMPETITIVENESS FACTORS IN TOURISM INDUSTRY - Tourism in Central Asia: Cultural Potential and Challenges - page 212

Figure 1 shows the map of the Silk Road countries after cluster analy-
sis is employed. In the map, Cluster 1 countries have been shown in dark
yellow and Cluster 2 countries in blue.

FIGURE 1 Map of clustered Silk Road countries.

One of the other aims of this analysis is to compare both clusters in
terms of T&T Competitiveness Index pillars and variables. For this pur-
pose, we employed five t-test analyzes the results of which are reported in
Tables 3-6.

RESULTS OF T-TEST FOR TRAVEL & TOURISM
COMPETITIVENESS PILLARS

The results of t-test (see Table 3) for cluster membership and Travel &
Tourism Competitiveness pillars revealed that Cluster 2 countries per-
formed better than Cluster 1 countries in ten out of 14 competitiveness
pillars, which are policy rules and regulations (Mean 1 = 4.04, Mean 2 =
4.45; t = -2.530; p = 0.019), environmental sustainability (Mean 1 = 3.86,
Mean 2 = 4.44; t = -4,148; p = 0.002), health and hygiene (Mean 1 = 4.78,
Mean 2 = 6.01; t = -3.512; p = 0.002), air transport infrastructure (Mean 1
= 2.72, Mean 2 = 3.83; t = -4.2789; p = 0.000), ground transport infra-
structure (Mean 1 = 3.20, Mean 2 = 4.34; t = -3.548; p = 0.002), tourism
infrastructure (Mean 1 = 2.28, Mean 2 = 4.98; t = -5.460; p = 0.000), ICT