The Direct and Indirect Contributions of Tourism to Regional GDP: Hawaii

After two decades of development and refinement, the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) has been touted as the most comprehensive way to measure the economic contribution of tourism to a destination's gross domestic product. However, recent literature has pointed out that the TSA is deficient in that it does not yield the indirect contribution of tourism to GDP. This paper shows that the TSA cannot be used to estimate the indirect contribution unless the import content of tourism is zero. The indirect contribution can be estimated using input-output (I-O) multipliers. We illustrate using Hawaii as an example.