Methods used to measure the economic impacts of tpurism and a model to measure the outbound tourism income of Turkey

Interest in tourism has grown substantially over the last quarter of 20th century as the tourism has become a significant economic phenomenon for the world economy. One of the reasons for this increasing interest is positive economic impacts of tourism such as; income, employment etc. However, tourism industry remains difficult to define and measure due to its heterogenous nature. Because of these difficulties many different impact assesment methods are used. In this research direct observation, sample surveys, bank returns, residual receipts, seasonal difference, expenditure ratio, cost factor, multiplier, input-output methods and tourism satellite accounts have been examined. Tourism satellite account (the last method studied in this research) has been developed by international organizations such as World Tourism Organization, United Nations and Organization for Economic Co-operations and Development to form a standard and internationally acceptable economic impact assesment method. Tourism satellite account is used to measure the economic impacts of tourism in many nations and Turkey. However, this method has not been implemented correctly in Turkey. In this study tourism satellite account has been offered as a best method to measure the economic impacts of tourism for Turkey by correcting the implementation mistakes. This study has found out that there are some defects and inefficiencies of Turkey's implementation of tourism satellite accounts to measure the inbound tourism income. These defects and inefficiencies variy from sampling the international visitors as tourists and excursionists to payment made to person conducting the questionnaire. It has been realized that these mistakes cause inbound tourism income figures of Turkey to be exaggerated. As a result, in this study, a model has been offered to measure Turkey's inbound tourism income figures more correctly than the method used by theTurkish State Institute of Statistics. This model, based on tourism satellite account, has been claimed to correct the mistakes of the model used by the Turkish State Instutute of Statistics. vu