Tourism, unlike ‘conventional’ industries such as agriculture or manufacturing that are classified in accordance with the goods and services they produce, is defined by the characteristics of the customer demanding tourism products. Tourism products can cut across standard industry definitions, and therefore require a different approach.
A tourism satellite account integrates data about the supply and use of tourism-related goods and services into a single format. It provides a summary measure of the contribution tourism makes to production and employment, consistent and integrated with New Zealand’s official national accounts. This ensures that the importance of the tourism sector is measured and understood in the context of the New Zealand economy as a whole. New Zealand’s tourism satellite account (TSA) measures expenditure in New Zealand by both resident and non-resident tourists, and thus gives a picture of the overall size of the tourism industry, including its contribution to GDP and employment.
Satellite accounts are an extension of the core national accounts, and involve the rearrangement of existing information in the national accounts so that an area of particular economic or social importance can be analysed more closely. As extensions of the core system of national accounts, satellite accounts are an important recommendation of the international standard, the System of National Accounts 1993 (Inter-Secretariat Working Group on National Accounts, 1993).
We present both final and provisional estimates in Tourism Satellite Account: 2009. The supply and use framework provides a detailed picture of the economy broken down by industry, product, primary input, and final demand categories. It provides the starting point for deriving final accounts. In order to give a more timely picture of the impact of tourism, provisional TSAs are prepared using fewer data sources than final year estimates. The provisional estimates are presented in a less detailed format, and are subject to revision as relevant data sources subsequently become available.
As balanced supply and use tables are completed for the relevant years (as part of the ongoing production of the New Zealand System of National Accounts), we are able to replace provisional results with final year estimates.
Tourism Satellite Account: 2009 presents results for the years ended March 2006–09 at the aggregated provisional estimate level in current prices. Appendix 6 contains detailed results for the latest final account, the year ended March 2005, updated since the previously released results in Tourism Satellite Account: 2007.
Value added
Value added is the ‘value’ businesses add to the goods and services they purchase (intermediate inputs) and use in the process of producing their own outputs. The measurement of tourism’s direct value added, also known as tourism’s direct contribution to GDP, is the major focus of the TSA. As direct value added for tourism is measured on the same basis as that used for industries in the national accounts, it enables a consistent comparison between the tourism industry’s contribution to GDP and that of more traditional industries such as agriculture and construction.
Direct value added does not measure the full impact of tourism on the New Zealand economy because it is limited to those businesses that have a direct relationship with tourists. Additional value added results from tourism through production of the intermediate inputs used in the production of goods and services sold to tourists, although there is no direct relationship between the producer of the intermediate inputs and the tourist. This additional value added is known as indirect value added.