Measuring the economic impact of tourism: Methodology and main results of the Tourism Satellite Account in the European Union

Measuring the impacts generated by tourism is important to improve the decision-making process affecting this activity. One of the main tools used to do so is the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) due to its international nature. In this research, a total of 27 countries belonging or closely related to the European Union (EU) are compared through their TSA. The aim of this paper is to obtain general conclusions about how the tourism activity is structured in these states so as to identify differences between them. In addition, supplementary data has been used in order to develop different types of rates for facilitating the analysis. Finally, the study analyzes the disadvantages linked to the use of TSAs as a comparison tool and the future improvements that are required in order to obtain a better collection of tourism statistics.