Chapter 5 - Measuring and Reporting the Impact of Tourism on Poverty

Abstract

The adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) by United Nations agencies, bilateral and multilateral development agencies has encouraged the World Tourism Organization, national tourism administrations and some development agencies to adopt new approaches to tourism development, focusing on local economic impacts and, in particular, on poverty alleviation. In order to demonstrate that tourism can contribute to achieving MDG, and other sustainable economic development objectives, it is necessary to develop some robust methodologies for measuring and reporting the poverty impact of particular initiatives and approaches. This paper presents a brief review and critique of current ways of measuring and reporting the economic impacts of tourism on national economies in the context of the changing policy environment of tourism and development. As the policy focus shifts towards the local development impact of tourism on local economies and poverty reduction in the developing world, traditional indicators are less useful. International visitor arrivals and spend figures, tourism satellite accounts and multipliers are unable to measure the impact of tourism on local economic development in general and poverty reduction in particular. Drawing on work on tourism and poverty reduction and responsible tourism in The Gambia, Egypt and Tanzania, this paper presents examples for ways of measuring local economic impac, which can be used to measure change over time. The methodologies presented have all been used in the field and each will be presented with real data and in sufficient detail to permit use of the method in order to generate comparable data. The economic impact measures reviewed and illustrated here include: the economic impact of earnings remitted from tourism development zones to subsistence agriculture areas within Egypt; reporting of the impacts at community and household levels of a coffee farmers initiative in Tanzania; measurement of the impact of changes in organisation and market access on the earnings of groups of poor informal sector workers in The Gambia. The paper concludes with some suggestions about how these data collecting methodologies can be used to create a repository of comparable data.