The regional value of tourism 2011
This report examines the value of tourism in the regions and sub-regions of the UK. Tourism is very much a demand side phenomenon and any analysis of the economic value, or contribution, of the sector is dependent on information on the spending of visitors.
Clearly this expenditure is on products and services provided by industries but there is no sole tourism industry but rather a set of industries, such as accommodation, food and drink serving activities, and passenger transport services.
It is this set of tourism industries that constitute the supply side of tourism. The difficulty in measuring the value of tourism is determining what proportion of the output of these tourism industries is accounted for by the expenditure of visitors, in other words we need to reconcile the supply and demand sides of tourism.
The most complete treatment of these two elements of tourism is the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA), developed internationally by the UN World Tourism Organisation, OECD and Eurostat.
The TSA uses a national accounts framework to determine the supply side of tourism, in terms of output and employment, before reconciling this information with demand side visitor expenditure data from overseas visitors to the UK, domestic overnight visitors, same day visitors, and the expenditure of UK residents travelling abroad before they depart the country.
The end result of this reconciliation is a set of tourism ratios for each tourism product, or service, which indicate the proportion of the value or output that is attributable to visitor expenditure. A complete TSA for the UK has been produced by ONS for the reference dates 2008-2011.
Here we extend the TSA analysis to the regional level in the UK and the sub-regional level in England and Wales to give an indication of the value of tourism at these spatial scales.
It is important to note that it is not possible to construct regional TSAs in the UK without fully developed regional input output and supply use tables. What we can achieve however is a disaggregation of the main outputs of the TSA to the regional and sub-regional levels. This disaggregation is achieved through the use of the business survey data from the ONS and visitor expenditure data from tourism surveys which are used to give estimates of the supply and demand sides of tourism and, therefore, also allow for a reconciliation of the two at these spatial scales.
