Читать книгу Global Experience Industries - Jens Christensen - Страница 14

While it is not too difficult to measure the amount of international travel, it is more complicated to determine the economic significance of tourism. Tourist demands are met by a number of separate industries dealing with transportation, accommodation, catering, attractions, etc. Because national statistics only measure revenues at total trade level, they do not reveal who buys the goods. To make a national tourist account, it is necessary to extract the relevant parts from several trade or industry statements and methods to do so have been developed, even on an international level, to make a so-called ‘satellite account’.⁴ Consequently, it is possible to measure the economic significance of tourism on a national and a worldwide level. In practice however, this is no simple task and only few nations have established a national tourism satellite account.

Satellite accounts comprise the value of direct tourism consumption. Indirect impacts of tourism on national and world economies are not included, however: the so-called multiplier effect. Mainly, the tourist satellite account encompasses the supply and demand of goods related to the tourism industry and is therefore, the best estimation of the businesses dealing with tourism. The results of satellite accounts are larger than traditional tourism measures, among other things because they include short-term travel which so far has been excluded from tourism accounts. As a consequence in most official statistics, the economic importance of tourism is underestimated at local, national and global levels.⁵

In spite of these statistical shortcomings, WTTC has commissioned Accenture to make annual global and national accounts of the tourism industry and economy.⁶ Although it is called a satellite account, judging from the numbers the results are lower than a full satellite account.⁷ The WTTC account may therefore be seen as a conservative estimation of national and global tourism. The account measures the size of the tourism industry that supplies tourist goods and services as well as the size of the broader tourism economy.

FIGURE 3 The Global Tourism Industry and Economy in $bn, 1970-2015

Source: UNTWO. Historical Perspective of World Tourism. WTTC. The 2007 Travel & Tourism Economic Research.