| Abstract: |
Defining the tourism sector poses a considerable challenge, owing to the
diversified nature of its economic activities, which encompass services,
industries, and agriculture. The extent of tourism s influence varies
substantially across these sectors, making it arduous to gauge its
contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP). To surmount this challenge,
the satellite accounting method (TSA) is typically used to establish the
spread of tourism across different economic activities and subsequently
determine its contribution to final production. A range of approaches,
including impact models, cost-benefit models, social accounting matrices
(SAMs), and computable general equilibrium (CGE), have been utilized to
evaluate the economic ramifications of tourism (see Frechtling, 2009; Madsen
and Zhang, 2010; Rossouw and Saayman, 2011; and Dwyer et al., 2007). However,
since 2010, TSAs have become, the standard tool to measure the direct economic
contributions of tourism (Cañada, 2013; Dwyer et al., op.cit.). Within the
framework of satellite accounting (TSA), the expenditure approach is typically
adopted, although it should not be regarded as the exclusive method. Given
that tourism expenditure is the key metric used to determine tourism s
contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) in the satellite accounts, it
is essential to ascertain which aggregate is considered within the Italian
satellite accounting framework. Other countries approaches to this matter
generally rely on industry data (Structural Business Statistics), input-output
tables in the System of National Accounts (SNA), and/or visitor surveys (Pham
and Dwyer, 2013). The TSA has the advantage to identify industry outputs that
are consumed or purchased for tourism as well as their contribution to key
macroeconomic indicators such as GDP, national income, and employment
(Frechtling, 2010; Jones et al., 2009). The relationship between tourism and
other economic sectors remains incompletely understood since tourism is not
identified as a separate industry in a country s input-output tables. Several
studies have investigated the dominant economic activity aggregated in
"homogeneous production branches or activity branches, " without explicitly
distinguishing tourism activity from non-tourism activity, such as in the case
of the restaurant industry. The present study seeks to address this issue by
considering the tourism industry as it is defined in the Tourism Satellite
Accounts and incorporating this classification into the Input-Output (I-O)
framework. To achieve this objective, the economic activities pertaining to
the tourism industry, as delineated within the framework of satellite
accounting, were consolidated within the Input-Output (I-O) tables under the
designation of the "tourism sector." In this process, the original economic
activities were appropriately weighted by employing the tourism coefficients
derived from satellite accounting. Concurrently, the economic activities
within the tourism industry that were not directly associated with tourism
were encompassed within the non-tourism sector. The latest Input-Output scheme
published by ISTAT for the year 2019 was used for this purpose. To estimate
the overall impact of tourism on employment, income, and production by
calculating multipliers, it was necessary to first compute technical
coefficients for the tourism sector. Subsequently, the study presents forward
and backward linkage coefficients to illustrate how variations in the tourism
sectors would influence the value-added , production, employment, and income
of the entire national economy. This could prove valuable for economic policy
planning, particularly for policymakers who seek to measure the impact of the
tourism industry on other sectors. However, given that the contribution of the
tourism industry to GDP is determined using the expenditure approach, the
paper begins by focusing on a preliminary analysis of discrepancies in data
pertaining to tourism spending. This constitutes a key aspect in understanding
the quality of the tourism coefficient used to derive the tourism sector in
the I-O scheme, and subsequently, the impact of the tourism industry as an
industry was calculated by aggregating the activity branches. |