Julie Reimann (p), Jane Stacey

Filipe Batista e Silva

The demand for robust data and evidence on the economic impact of tourism has never been stronger. Despite significant work on tourism economics, notably with the Tourism Satellite Account, measures that quantify the direct and indirect impacts of tourism remains challenging. The nature of tourism as a complex, service-based sector built on the movement of people makes it hard to measure, and the timeliness of tourism data overall remains a challenge.

Providing access to tourism data has become a key priority for many countries and the sector to enable better decision making for government, business and the local community. The ability to measure the economic impacts of tourism provides policy makers with the evidence necessary to ensure that future policies are targeted to meet strategic objectives. As resource and capacity constraints continue to play a role, there is a need to consider what data is meaningful to portray the tourism context and enable decision making.

The rapid succession of recent crises has highlighted the importance of having timely, granular and comparable data to effectively inform policy and business decisions, and ensure policies are well targeted, have the desired impact and meet strategic objectives. More progress is needed to better measure the economic, environmental and social dimensions of tourism, and develop timely and robust indicators and tools to monitor the effectiveness of tourism policies and the resilience and sustainability of tourism development. Digitalisation has opened up new opportunities to support data-driven policy decisions and meet the policy demand for new, more granular and more timely data in a rapidly changing world. This is putting pressure on statistical agencies and organisations to exploit new sources of data.

This paper will build on ongoing work undertaken by the OECD to improve the economic measurement of tourism, including a recent survey on using new data sources and tools to measure tourism, and tailored support to countries to implement Tourism Satellite Accounts and improve the evidence base for sustainable tourism development.

Riccardo Curtale, Paolo Figini, Roberto Patuelli, Filipe Batista e Silva (p)

Tomas Filipe R.

Tourism is a demand-driven macro-sector whose boundaries are defined by the consumption from tourists in different economic sectors. The measurement of the overall economic contribution of tourism in a country's economy is a complex and challenging task as there is no official statistics separating the economic activity generated by tourists or residents. An attempt to shed lights on this figure is provided by the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA): the standard statistical framework developed in 2008 by a joint effort from the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat) and the United Nations Statistics Division. It uses the same concepts, definitions and classifications as national accounts and aims for measuring tourist activity and the importance of tourism to national economies.
Nowadays, TSAs data in the European Union (EU) and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries present some limitations, including 1) the assessment of solely direct contribution of tourism to the economy, failing to capture the indirect and induced impact, 2) scattered data coverage and inconsistent time series, due to TSAs not being included in the regulatory framework of tourism statistics in the EU and collected on a voluntary basis.
This paper aims to address these limitations by: 1) proposing a new method to estimate the total contribution of tourism on the economy by combining TSAs data with Input-Output Tables, 2) using official nights spent statistics to interpolate estimations of the economic contribution of tourism in the years when TSA data are not provided by national statistical institutes. The method is applied to the EU and EFTA countries that provided TSAs data during the 5th voluntary data collection conducted by Eurostat in 2022. Results show heterogeneity across countries in the contribution of tourism to the economy, and in economic multipliers of type I and II.
This research contributes significantly to the literature by providing a comprehensive method for estimating the economic impact of tourism. By addressing the limitations of existing TSAs data and incorporating additional sources, the paper enhances our understanding of the complex economic contribution of tourism. The findings of this study have implications for policymakers, businesses, and researchers seeking to understand the true economic value of the tourism sector.

Tomas Filipe Ramalhete (p)

Julie Reimann

The Industrial ecosystems approach goes beyond the strict direct economic impact and looks to not only look to goods and services that are directly a part of tourism activity, but also considers how it affects surrounding activities that are related to it; for instance some consulting services, legal support and much more. This approach allows for a more cross-cutting approach that gives a broader overview of the economic impact of tourism. The approach was developed to support for EU-wide policy, with a focus on addressing the challenges of the twin digital and green transitions. Since the original development the approaches methodology has shown itself to be fruitful with calculations such as business and consumer confidence, and in decomposing producer price inflation. Furthermore, its use has expanded with the EIB (European Investment Bank) using it for its Investment Report and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) using it for ecosystem specific studies. There is thus value in looking at tourism from the industrial ecosystems approach with key performance indicators such as trade, bankruptcies, turnover and employment.