Investigating the Efficiency of Iran's Tourism Industry in Different Climates

As a service industry that has significantly expanded in recent years, tourism plays an important role in developing many countries, including Iran, which enjoys various unique historical, religious, cultural, and natural sites and a four-season climate. Therefore, this study set out to examine the efficiency of Iran's tourism industry using tourism data regarding its 31 provinces during the years 2011 to 2017, including the information concerning the budget allocated to the tourism sector, the number of accommodation places, the number of tourist attraction sites in each province, and the number of domestic and foreign tourists. To this end, Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis was used to analyze the collected data. The study's results showed that Ardabil, Tehran, Kohkiluyeh Boyer-Ahmad, and Gilan had had the efficiency in terms of tourism throughout the study period, with their average efficiency as a primary criterion for assessing the efficiency of the country's tourism industry reported as average. Moreover, the analysis of the tourism industry's efficiency in different climates suggested that the highest efficiency belonged to the temperate and humid climate, and the lowest one was related to the hot and dry climate. Therefore, it seems that facilitating transportation infrastructure and providing welfare facilities, especially in provinces with low efficiency, could help use the potentials of different provinces to develop the country's tourism industry.