The great difficulty in measuring the economic effects of tourism is that it is a cross sector which means there are multiple businesses in different branches of activity offering services to the tourists, at the same time as producing other goods and services not related to the tourism activity. For this reason, instead of studying tourism from the point of view of supply the normal option is to study it from the point of view of demand. Nevertheless, it would be erroneous to only consider the beneficial effects of direct tourism expenditure, given the existence of indirect and induced effects. In the first section, different methodologies to measure the economic impact of tourism are shown. In the second section, an input-output model and tourism satellite account is described and finally these methodologies are applied to the Spanish economy, a highly specialised tourism economy, to quantify the impact of tourism on production, employment, exports and imports. In the last section the conclusions Will be made.
