Combining Tourism Economic Account and Tourism Employment Module for a best measurement of tourism at a sub-national level

Abstract

For more than 15 years, the World tourism organization and other major multilateral organizations have worked on the development of reliable tools for assessing tourism related to others economic activities in a country: the tourism satellite account. Its implementation at a sub-national level is a challenging endeavour and requires going beyond this framework. A regional tourism economic account is a good answer to the demand for regional tourism economic data and to highlight the problematic of employment with a tourism employment module. This combination sheds a new light on the role of tourism in creating, preserving and diversifying jobs in the economy. We developed a regional tourism economic account (RTEA), based on the supply-side, in order to take advantage of the existence a system of regional accounts and to respond to the lack of domestic tourism data. All these developments have been applied in a French overseas region, Reunion Island. The results show their feasibility. The others ultra-peripheral regions of European Union, others European islands and more generally small island tourism economies can benefit from this experience, (i.e. all regions in which a system of regional account has been implented).