Tourism events: Impacts on imports

Resumen

The impact of tourism consumption on imports has hardly been discussed in the literature. The issue is an important one however, and must be explained further in relation to the evaluation of the impact that tourism, or tourism events in particular, have on a destination. Imports can be seen to be a leakage that limits the positive impact of expenditure on a destination. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the principal methodological questions that arise in the estimation of the impact of tourism consumption on import flows and to explore how this methodology can be applied to tourism events. Various methodologies are available for analysing the relationship between expenditure on tourism events and imports: the open and the closed input-output models, the social accounting matrix model and computable general equilibrium models. The advantages and disadvantages of each model in the context of tourism events are explained and some advantages in terms of coherence of the open input-output models are highlighted. Examples are used to illustrate the relevance of import leakages and the application of the methods proposed.