Assessing the Competitiveness of Sri Lanka's Tourism in the COVID Period by Porter's Diamond Model

Introduction

Tourism highlights as one of the fastest-growing economic sectors within the service economy and the main source of foreign currency for a large number of countries, especially the countries in developing states around the world (Fernando, 2015; Fernando, 2020). As further, by the vast human potential, national materials, and through multiple effects on areas of references, the tourism sector acts as a stimulating factor for economic development. Herein, tourism truly bond people with different types of leisure activities, that allows to inspire nature and natural environment, different destinations, variety of experiences, as well inspire the own lives with traveling, livelihood, and culture of other destinations (Fernando and Long, 2012; Fernando,2015). As mentioned by scholars (Cunha and Cunha, 2005), the open economy and the quick globalization and internationalization, had heightened the sector, to become the second most important global services sector by providing enormous foreign income to the economic prosperity of an appreciable number of destinations. Indeed the tourism sector is a critical global economic inventive for its potentiality on economic growth whereas the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) pointed out that a growing national tourism sector is the main contributor to enhance employment, rise up the national income and improve the balance of payments as well as an important driving force for growth and prosperity in developing countries and a key contributor to reducing poverty (Fernando and Long, 2012).

Tourism is a multi-complex system, as stimulating equipment of the travel as, food and accommodation, influencing business services like health, sanitary and leisure, and a sector that could add value to certain products that couldn’t do in any other economic activity (Fernando and Long, 2012; Fernando,2015). The tourism industry assigns a value to assets like climate, fresh air, scenic beauty, therapeutic mineral waters, landscape as such ensuring the development of less rich areas with resources, based on their natural and human resources (Iordache et al.,2010), and nature-based niche markets as Tea related tourism, gem related tourism and rural tourism (Fernando et al, 2016, Pattiyagedara and Fernando,2020). As its benefits will affect the economy of the territories, and promotes inter and intra-regional disparity elimination, as by being a remedy on prosperity in rural areas by urbanizing, housing constructions, road development, planning and lot of public activities. On the way, assuring the main objective of increasing the quality of the residents' livelihood, the ultimate goal of the destination competitiveness, (Iordache et al., 2010; Kim and Dwyer, 2003; Fernando, 2012). Importance of the Special Interest Tourism (SIT) has been enhanced in previous decades, whereby providing global opportunities on niche tourism products such as Medical, Sex, Tea, Rural, Spiritual, Adventure, Eco, Agro, Golf, Gem related and Culinary tourism (Fernando, 2012; Fernando et al, 2015). Therefore, develop inspirations upon creative repackaging or re-marketing and innovative new product offerings have been highlighted by many destinations. The composition of the Tourism sector has been illustrated in Figure 1, with basic eight sectorial interrelationships, as every part is essential for successful operations and survival.

Figure 1.

Composition of the Tourism service sector