I. Introduction
Tourism has been grown rapidly over the past decade. Aggregate trends and patterns
indicate that receipts from international tourism increased by an average of 8.2 percent
annually for the past decade, reaching $ 440 billion in 1998, while international arrivals
during the same period rose by a yearly average of 4.3 percent to reach $ 635 million in
1998। Tourism, along with information technology, is expected to lead economic

activity in the next two decades, with a growth rate in job creation one-and-a-half times
that of any other industrial sector. Regarding export earnings, tourism has become the
world’s largest export earner and an increasingly important item on the Balance of
Payments for many countries. Furthermore, foreign currency receipts from international
tourism reached $439 billion in 1998, a sum larger than that of any other product or
service including exports of petroleum products, motor vehicles, telecommunications equipment, or textiles

While there is fairly detailed information on tourists’ arrivals, nationalities, their
estimated expenditures and so forth, there is limited information on the contribution of
this sector to output, employment, and income. These shortcomings characterize
tourism information and statistics in both developed and developing countries alike. The
lack of a solid, comprehensive, and internationally uniform information base on the
economic impact of tourism has triggered efforts, particularly by developed countries,
to address this weakness.1 Progress has been slow, however. Except for a few developed
countries, statistical information on the whole remains scanty, incomplete, and for the
most part focused on simple calculations of international arrivals without any
subsequent analysis of the impact of tourism activity on its respective economy.2

This situation deprives both the tourism authorities and companies of information
essential to making public policy and developing business strategies. Furthermore, the
current status of tourism information reduces social awareness of tourism’s importance
as a factor promoting economic growth and as a source of employment. National
accounts focus only on the ‘hotels and restaurants’ sector despite that foreign tourists’
contribution to GDP. Because tourism is not properly reflected in the existing national
1 Refer to efforts by the OECD, Canada, the US, the EU and others to overcome this information
difficulty with this sector.
2 See for example, papers presented at the World Trade Organization’s conference on the measurement of
the economic impact of tourism, June 15-18