A Regional Approach for Tourism Satellite Accounts and Links to the National Account

Based on a number of regional and local tourism value-added studies carried out in Switzerland, this paper presents an implementation-oriented and pragmatic approach that provides important theoretical insights and empirical data on which to build regional satellite accounts. Regional and national satellite accounts can be used for tourism-oriented economic analysis as well as for decision making in the area of tourism policy and marketing. The main focus here lies in the empirical determination and balancing of tourism supply and demand through a mixture of top-down and bottom-up methods. The structure of the article is as follows: a brief outline of main theoretical considerations in the tourism sector is followed by a discussion of the most important methodological aspects of the regional approach. The next part deals with the presentation of the individual procedural steps on the demand side (tourism frequencies and expenditures) and the supply side (tourism production) to estimate the direct and indirect regional effects of tourism activities in terms of tourism-relevant gross output, value-added and intermediate consumption. A selection of empirical findings on the demand and supply sides is presented both to document the individual procedural steps discussed before and to highlight the similarities and differences between the regional findings. The paper concludes with an outline of how the methodological approach and the empirical findings can be used in the establishment of a tourism satellite account at the national level.