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This study analyse the technical efficiency in terms of innovation of the firms in the service sector in the Uruguayan economy. Therefore, we use data from the 2010-2012 Innovation Activities Survey of the National Agency for Research and Innovation (ANII). In a first stage, we estimate the level of efficiency of each company through a Data Envelopment Analysis model, incorporating the inputs and outputs related to the innovative activity of the firms. The results reveal that, despite the effort made in terms of investment in innovation, the results are still very poor. On average, the companies analysed could increase their innovation production by 44.5% given the resources invested. Subsequently, we explore the relationship between innovative efficiency and several characteristics of the firms. In this sense, we found that medium-sized firms have lower efficiency than small and large companies. The results can be useful for both those responsible for the area of innovation of the firms, as well as to the institutions that provide support in the field of innovation (such as the ANII), since they provide substantive evidence to improve the orientation of the innovative strategy to be followed by firms in the service sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This piper introduces the use of graphs in the analysis of the determinants of tourists' expenditure, providing an alternative approach to the methods usually employed. Graph-based analysis is applied to study the behavior of cruise passengers arriving at the ports of Montevideo and Punta del Este in Uruguay. The graphical representation allows to synthesize and visualize the relationships between the set of variables that characterize tourists or tourist groups and the determinants of their level of spending. The graphbased methodology is particularly suitable to represent the dependency relationships among variables (between adjacent nodes) and conditional independence (between non-adjacent, nodes). For the empirical application, individual data from the surveys of cruise passengers corresponding to the cruise season between November 2014 and April 2015 in Uruguay are considered. The existence of dependencies between spending variables and other variables that, may be of interest (sociodemographic, contextual, etc.) is studied. The exercise shows that, the variables that, better explain visitors' behavior are linked to the port, of disembarkation and the expenditure. The results also show that, socioeconomic variables are not. directly linked to spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]