Principle and function of tourism satellite account

In the mid-1990s, the accounting method of tourism satellite accounts was highly praised by international economists and statisticians as soon as it appeared. In March 2000, the United Nations Statistical Commission officially approved the Tourism Subsidiary Account: Proposed Methodological Framework submitted by the World Tourism Organization (referred to as the Framework), making tourism the first industry approved by the United Nations to adopt international standards for measurement and measurement. TSA, tourism satellite account (TSA), also known as tourism subsidiary account, is a macro statistical measurement method. On the basis of statistics, it is a subsystem established separately under the general account of national economic accounting according to the internationally unified concept and classification standard of national accounts. By compiling this account, the direct and indirect tourism output caused by tourism consumption in various industries of the national economy can be separated from related industries for separate accounting, so as to achieve the purpose of comprehensively measuring, analyzing and comparing the tourism economy under the framework of international unified statistics. Different from the traditional tourism statistics system, the tourism satellite account provides an internationally unified standard measurement method for tourism developing countries, which not only greatly improves the credibility and comparability of tourism statistics, but also accurately and comprehensively measures the position and role of tourism economy in the whole national economy, and realizes the international comparability and quantitative analysis of its impact on tourism economy.

In the early 1990s, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) did a lot of research work on the importance of tourism to the social economy, and made great efforts to solve the difficult problems such as how to describe the tourism economy and how to measure the impact of tourism on the economy, which played an important role in the establishment of satellite accounts later. WTO, OECD, Eurostat and the United Nations Statistics Division collaborated to compile "Tourism Satellite Accounts: A Proposed Methodological Framework (TSA: RMF)". The Statistical Commission agreed to this framework and approved its adoption in March 2000.

Tourism satellite accounts provide decision makers with an overview of the tourism sector and a comparison with other economic sectors. Following the principle of national economic accounting, the framework has formulated a series of global standards and definitions to measure the contribution of tourism to GDP, employment, capital investment, taxation, and the important role of tourism in the country's international balance of payments.