Top down or bottom up? Issues in the development of sub-national tourism satellite accounts

The tourism satellite account (TSA) project is well developed with many countries either having published a TSA or making significant progress towards doing so. More recently, a number of regions have moved to develop similar approaches aimed at enumerating the significance of tourism for their economies, whilst several countries have regionalised the results of national TSAs. This article considers the prospects for the TSA regional project. It examines the possible technical approaches, roughly categorising these as 'top down' and 'bottom up', and their relative merits and problems. The article discusses the regional project more generally using UK evidence as an illustration and concludes that regions should only embark upon detailed TSA construction where there is a demonstrable policy need, and where statistical systems and human capital is adequate to the task.