اجرای نیروی جاذبه ای توسط مقصد توریستی برزیل در مسافران هوایی خارجی  Gravitational force exerted by Brazilian tourist destinations on foreign air travelers

1. Introduction Availability of transports is a key element for the development of tourist destinations (Heraty, 1989; Prideaux, 2000; Bieger and Wittmer, 2006; Dieken and Button, 2011; Lohmann et al., 2013), and is included in the broad universe of tourist mobilities (Allis, 2013), helping to determine the geographic flow of tourists (Page, 2008). Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies that bring together transport engineering and other disciplines like economics and geography, among others, are important to advance knowledge about tourism. Brazil is the largest country by area and population in South America and is politically divided at the local level into 5570 municipalities1 (IBGE, 2014), located in 27 “federative units” (26 states plus the Distrito Federal, containing the capital, Brasília, treated as a state here). These are arranged in five geographic regions (South, Southeast, Midwest, Northeast and North). Of these municipalities, 3345 are part of the process of regionalisation of tourism (Brasil, 2013a). While a process of municipalisation of tourism occurred in the 1990s under the National Program for Municipalisation of Tourism (PNMT), the regionalisation process began in 2003 with the Program for Regionalisation of Tourism (PRT), tied to the National Tourism Plan 2003e2007 (Brasil, 2003). This plan has been successively updated for the period 2007e2010 (Brasil, 2007) and the current one, 2013e2016 (Brasil, 2013a). Brazil has long been a major tourist destination in the global context, and this position has increased in recent years, both due to the holding of mega-events (2014 World Cup and the upcoming 2016 Olympic Games) and efforts under these plans to enhance the attractiveness of tourist destinations. According to the official statistics of the Ministry of Tourism, in 2012 the country received 5,676,843 foreign tourists, of whom 77.23%, arrived by air (Brasil, 2013b). Therefore, air transport plays a crucial role for the competitiveness of this activity in the context of the strategy to regionalise tourism in the country. According to the Anuario Estatístico de Turismo
(“Tourism Statistical Yearbook”) for 2013 (Brasil, 2013b), in 2012 there were 13 airports that received international traffic flows, located in 12 states (Amazonas, Bahia, Ceara, Minas Gerais, Par

a, Parana, Pernambuco,
Rio Grande do Norte, Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, Santa Catarina and Sao Paulo) and the Distrito Federal. The process of regionalisation marked its tenth anniversary in2013, so with more than a decade now concluded, it is worthwhile analysing the results. Therefore, the general objective of this study is to identify, based on the principles of the gravity model, the attractive force of Brazilian states that have international airports. The study is exploratory and quantitative in nature, through statistical analysis.