CLUSTERING SILK ROAD COUNTRIES BASED ON COMPETITIVENESS FACTORS IN TOURISM INDUSTRY - Tourism in Central Asia: Cultural Potential and Challenges - page 223

Test results for the human resources pillar show that Cluster 2 countries
performed better in five variables, which are namely primary education
enrollment (Mean 1 = 89.65; Mean 2 = 97.20; t = −2.492; p = 0.021) , local
availability of research and training services (Mean 1 = 3.55; Mean 2 = 4.43;
t = −3.075; p = 0.006) , hiring and firing practices (Mean 1 = 4.43; Mean 2
= 3.52; t = 4.253; p = 0.000) , business impact of HIV/AIDS (Mean 1 =
5.30; Mean 2 = 5.97; t = −2.517; p = 0.020) , and life expectancy (Mean 1 =
69.00; Mean 2 = 77.44; t = −4.868; p = 0.000) . These results indicate that
Cluster 2 countries provide advantages for tourism firms via a higher level
of education, especially primary education, and local research and training
services. To be able to develop a talented and motivated workforce, level
of education in a certain country plays a significant role. Aside from this
finding, availability of research and training opportunities, such as human
resource agencies providing hiring and training services for firms, make
it easier for countries to have a more skilled and motivated workforce. As
a result, it is expected that the quality of services and customer satisfac-
tion in tourism industry will be improved. Similarly, the level of negative
impact of HIV/AIDS on business is lower in Cluster 2 countries, which in-
dicates that deaths, disabilities, absenteeism, and medical, funeral, recruit-
ment and training expenses will be lower and productivity and revenues
will be higher. Although the score of hiring and firing practices is higher
for Cluster 1 countries, the result proves that it is easier and has no formal
rules when hiring and firing personnel, which means that these countries
have no systematic human resource practices and institutional standards.
Findings for the natural resources pillar revealed mixed results. In the
interpretation of natural resources (see Table 3), we postulated that Cluster
2 countries had higher scores and more advantageous conditions to devel-
op nature-based tourism products and attract tourists. Contrary to this pre-
diction, t-test results in Table 6 revealed that individual variables of natu-
ral resources pillar did not produce statistically significant different scores,
which makes further interpretation difficult for individual variables.
The third pillar, cultural resources, revealed certain meaningful results
(see Table 6) in two out of four variables, namely, sport stadiums (Mean 1
= 19823.28; Mean 2 = 52998.77; t = −3.497; p = 0.002) and number of
international fairs and exhibitions (Mean 1 = 24.51; Mean 2 = 131.55; t =
−2.708; p = 0.014) . These findings may imply that the number of sport
stadiums and international fairs/exhibitions have the potential to create
a positive destination image and attract more tourists from all over the