The Tourism Satellite Account: definition and estimation problems

In this paper we conduct a theorethical-methodological analysis of the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA), having regard to its implementation, and helped by the exegesis of its characteristics. The discussion on its theoretical assumptions leads us to stress how, in the debate that has florished around it, the analysis of the structure of the TSA has been neglected and to propose to deeply investigating it to assess the situation. To this respect, we highlight the weakness of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) definition of tourism, having as a reference the TSA of Italy, because of the excessive breadth of the meaning in which tourism is seen, suggesting that it can be ameliorated, with positive repercussions at operational level, simply adopting a narrower definition, which does not include travel for business and other purposes. In the meantime, we demonstrate that the demand for accommodation and catering is overestimated due to the use of the 'presences' in the estimation methodology. Indeed, the presences that are used to estimate domestic expenditure improperly include both residents who are not outside their usual environment and non-residents, resulting in the overestimation of the internal tourist consumption for characteristic tourist services accommodation excluding second homes and catering. Regarding supply, we stress some problems of reconciliation between the branch 'Accommodation services; catering service activities' of the Input-Output Table (IOT) and the whole of the tourist accommodation and catering industries of the TSA that should be made explicit. Moreover, we point out the nature as a lagged document of the TSA. This makes it difficult to use it to get a picture of the current tourism situation, without resorting to hypotheses that are very little, if not at all, sustainable, as well as to take it as a basis for econometric analysis.