Tourism Satellite Account
A Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) is a statistical accountant framework in the field of tourism and measures the goods and services according to international standards of concepts, classifications and definitions which allow valid comparisons from country to country in a consistent manner. A complete TSA contains detailed production accounts of the tourism industry and their linkages to other industries, employment, capital formation and additional non-monetary information on tourism.
Why TSA is necessary
Statistical reasons:
Unlike output defined industries, such as agriculture or manufacturing, the primarily demand-defined tourism industry is not measured as a sector in its own right in National Accounts. Most of the statistical information provided on the specifics and developments of tourism is primarily based on arrivals and overnight stay statistics as well as balance of payments information.
Economic policy reasons:
Europe is the tourist destination N° 1 in the world. Depending on the definition of the tourism sector it employs between about 8.6 and 24 million people in the Community (corresponding to around 4 and 11 % of total labour force) and creates 4 or 11 % of the Community's GDP.
This major economic importance of tourism for the economy - made evident by some TSA-based estimation - increased the awareness of the importance of the sector, its socio-cultural and environmental impacts as well as its contributions to the achieving of the goals of the Lisbon strategy - to increase economic growth and to create more and better jobs.
The currently available statistics, however, do not sufficiently grasp the whole economic phenomenon of tourism.
History
In the late 1980s the OECD, UN and WTO encouraged the evolution of a tourism specific economic data system which is coherent with the concepts, classifications and definitions of national accounting standards. A Recommended Methodological Framework was concluded between UN, OECD, the World Tourism Organisation and Eurostat in 2000 and published by the UN in 2001.
EUROSTAT worked out an implementation manual for the EU with the aim to provide operational guidelines for empirical compilation of the TSA in an efficient procedure.
The European Implementation Manual on TSA (EIM)
*Please note - Annexes only to be found in the English version
To make use of the experience gained in the past the World Tourism Organisation has updated its TSA Manual in 2008. The new manual is based on three volumes: Manual for Compilers, Manual for Users (clients, decision makers, etc) and Manual for Educators (universities, research institutes, etc.).
Commission activities
The Commission promotes the use of TSAs by the EU Member States in order to improve the understanding of European tourism.
In the Communication Working together for the future of European Tourism (2001), the Commission highlighted the importance of implementing TSA. In an initial stage (2003-2006) the Commission granted financial support to Member States to carry out feasibility studies and to create TSAs.
16 Member States (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, United Kingdom and Ireland) joined that initiative, and preliminary data comparing the role of tourism in each national economy in terms of expenditure and GDP were produced.
A methodological workshop on TSA was arranged on 20th of April 2005. From the workshop and projects accomplished at that time it was concluded that there were not enough comparable data available in the official statistics. Especially their international comparability was insufficient because of differences in data collecting methods.
In 2008 Eurostat started a project on Tourism Satellite Accounts with the following main objectives:
- Assessment of the state of the art concerning the implementation of TSA in the member states of the EU
- Drawing up of a directory of best practices which are relevant for other countries compiling TSAs
- Organization of the exchange of best practices and experience in compiling TSA
- Development of a proposal for key figures to be used for an intermediate short-term update of the basic TSDA information
In this framework two workshop were organised in Prague (2008) and in Riga (2009) (links to events in newsroom)
The project, conducted with ICON Institute Public Sector GmbH in co-operation with WIFO - Austrian Institute of Economic Research and KOPINT-Tarki - Institute for Economic Research, should terminate by September 2009.
