Constructing the economic impact of tourism
In seeking to understand the extent, scale and consequences of tourism on the economies of countries and destinations, a range of analytical methods have been developed by economists. These usually involve collecting data to model the expenditure from tourism and its impact, as information gathered in visitor surveys can be used to identify:
● Direct expenditure by tourists on goods and services consumed (e.g. hotels, restaurants and tourist transport services), although this is not a definitive account of expenditure due to leakage of tourist spending to areas and corporations outside the local economy.
● Indirect expenditure by visitors is often estimated by identifying how many tourism enterprises use the income derived from tourists’ spending. This money is then used by enterprises to pay for services, taxes and employees, which then recirculates in the urban economy. In other words, tourist expenditure stimulates an economic process which passes through a series of stages (or rounds).
● The induced impact , by calculating the impact of expenditure from those employed in tourism and its effect on the local economy.
Source : Modified from Page (1995)
These three impacts are then used to estimate the nature of tourist spending, as illustrated in Figure 12.6 , which highlights the interrelationships that exist between tourism, tourist spending and other sectors of the economy. Figure 12.6 also introduces the concept of leakage, in which expenditure is lost from the local system to other areas. For planners and managers, maximizing local economic linkages (e.g. buying local produce and employing local people) the can enhance benefits of tourism to a locality. Where the local economy is very vulnerable, and dependent upon a large number of imports (e.g. labour, goods and services), leakage will be high and so reducing the openness of the tourism economy will help to improve the impact locally. Many rural areas are characteristically open economies and high levels of leakage in tourism occur there, whereas in urban areas leakage is reduced as the economy is more closed. In many less developed countries and island nations that depend upon tourism, the leakage is also high due to external control by multinational companies and a reluctance of tourism businesses to use local products. Instead, high-volume imports reduce the beneficial local effects of tourism. Economists use various tools to measure tourism demand in local economies; one is Multiplier Analysis, where a formula expresses changes that tourism spending can generate.
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More recently, governments have tried to understand how tourism affects the national economy. In conjunction with the UN-WTO and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, some countries have developed tourism satellite accounts (TSA) to measure more precisely the economic impact of tourism. In 1999 the New Zealand government launched the results of its TSA updating in 2006, which used a wide range of economic data to identify six main themes regarding the impact of tourism:
1. The direct impact of tourism on GDP.
2. Tourism expenditure expressed as a percentage of GDP.
3. The level of tourism employment in the economy.
4. The proportion of international travel-related expenditure as a percentage of total travel-related expenditure.
5. Domestic personal expenditure as a percentage of total travel expenditure.
6. Domestic business and government expenditure as a percentage of total travel expenditure.
The example of the New Zealand TSA is shown in Box 12.1 .
This modelling of the tourism economy is increasingly gaining credence in many governments, since reliable information on the economic impact of tourism is useful:
● for policy-making
● for planning and macro-management of the economy
● for allocating public sector resources towards tourism projects
● for internal government processes to secure additional resources for the Ministry of Tourism and the NTO.
In the New Zealand example, the TSA also helped to raise the profile of the tourism sector, since the magnitude of the economic impacts were far in excess of existing estimates of tourism’s effects on the national economy. Yet while it is now becoming easier to gauge the economic effect of tourism, as researchers use more refined methods of analysing its impact, it is much less visible and tangible than the social and cultural impacts which tourism induces.
BOX 12.1: CASE STUDY: THE TOURISM SATELLITE ACCOUNT IN NEW ZEALAND (BY MIKE CHAN, MINISTRY OF TOURISM, AND TANTRI TANTIRIGAMA, STATISTICS NEW ZEALAND)
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The New Zealand tourism satellite account (NZTSA) has been produced each year since 1999 by Statistics New Zealand, and was developed based on the UNWTO and OECD guidelines. NZTSA provides a wide range of economic measures related to tourism using data primarily sourced from Statistics New Zealand as well as other sources including New Zealand’s Ministry of Tourism. Some of the key measures include:
● direct tourism value added and contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
● tourism expenditure classified by tourist type – international and domestic household tourists, and government and business travellers – and their percentage contribution to total expenditure
● direct and indirect employment as a percentage of total employment in New Zealand
● the tax revenue (Goods and Services Tax) generated by tourism activities.
Other features such as indirect tourism value added are also measured. Figure 12.7 summarizes the principal findings from the NZTSA. For the year ended March 2006, total tourism expenditure in New Zealand totalled NZ$18.6 billion (up from NZ$12.4 billion in 1999). It highlights the substantial contribution that the tourism sector makes to the national economy.
Tourism directly and indirectly contributed 8.9 per cent to the national GDP. The total tourism expenditure comprised 55 per cent (NZ$10.3 billion) contribution by domestic tourists and 45 per cent (NZ$8.3 billion) by international tourists. The latter represents 19 per cent of the total New Zealand export earnings. Tourism is estimated to support directly and indirectly 183 000 full-time equivalent jobs or 9.9 per cent (one in ten) of the total New Zealand workforce in 2006.
The tourism satellite account (TSA) illustrates the significance of the diverse range of service sector activities which contribute to tourism. In that sense, TSA presents an overall model of the economic relationships between different sectors of the tourism industry.
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