EVALUACIÓN DE LA SOSTENIBILIDAD DEL TURISMO RURAL MEDIANTE INDICADORES SINTÉTICOS.

Tourism is one of the most dynamic sectors of worldwide economy; therefore, its development in the present context, assists to be economically viable, socially compatible and provides the lowest damage to the resources in the zone that it takes place. This only consists in guaranteeing the sustainability of this activity. For this purpose, the development of an indicators system to provide the management of its sustainability constitutes one of the main options to be taken into account. The present investigation shows an indicators system to the valuation of the sustainability in rural tourism zones, in fact, applied to rural destinations in Andalusia (Spain). Starting from this system, we construct composite indicators that give the possibility to measure the tourist sustainability and improve the understanding of information by the stakeholders in the decision making process. These indicators are characterized by an easy comprehension, due to they reduce the initial quantity of indicators with a lower amount of information lost; besides, they can be used to set up comparisons between different zones and provide the valuation of its behavior in a long period of time. These composite indicators construction occurs by techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (ACP) and the Distance Composite Indicator DP2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]