Panama leads tourism receipts per visitor, while the Dominican Republic leads in receipts as a percent of its GDP.

BY JOACHIM BAMRUD

Brazil has replaced Argentina as Latin America’s second-largest tourism destination, according to new data from the World Trade Organization.

However, the change was mainly due to Argentina losing tourists. Brazil still ended up among Latin America’s top five losers in tourism and receipt growth last year, according to a Latinvex analysis of WTO data.  Even worse, it ranks second-last in Latin America when international arrivals are compared with its population and tourism receipts are compared with its GDP.

In terms of growth, Venezuela, Chile and Ecuador were among the winners in both arrival and receipt increases, while Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay were among the losers.

While Mexico continues to dominate the number of arrivals and their overall receipts, three other countries stand out as Latin American tourism champions:

Panama leads the way in receipts per visitor.
The Dominican Republic leads the region in tourism receipts as a percent of its GDP.
Uruguay leads the way in arrival-population ratio despite a decline in visitors last year.

Costa Rica, which is known as a tourism champion, does well, although it doesn’t top any of the rankings in our analysis. It has Latin America’s second-highest arrival-population ratio and the third-highest receipts-GDP ratio.

Overall, Latin America received a total of ...

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Keywords: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Rio de Janeiro, Uruguay, Venezuela, World Cup 2014