Assessing progress in achieving greater compliance with international standards: the case of the New Icelandic Tourism Satellite Account

ABSTRACT

The Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) is an internationally standardized method for measuring the economic contributions of tourism to an economy. In 2015, Statistics Iceland published new TSA data as a result of a collaborative project with Icelandic Tourism Research Centre (ITRC), which was in charge of data compilation. Also, one year earlier ITRC proposed a number of recommendations in order to make the Icelandic TSA more compliant with international standards endorsed in 2008 by World Tourism Organization. The purpose of this study was to investigate the progress towards fulfilling the compliance with international standards following those recommendations. This is necessary for having a sort of follow-up by certifying to what extent the compliance was or was not achieved. In this regard a self-assessment scheme has been employed by establishing some levels of compliance with those recommendations. The findings suggest that while little more than a half of the recommendations (concerning TSA compilation issues) have been implemented, such advancement might be highly compromised due to lack of data sources. More, the study revealed that any country deciding to have a TSA more compliant with international standards should also adopt an assessment of its progress in such exercise.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism Satellite Account (TSA)
• tourism statistics
• compliance
• international standards
• Iceland

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Edward Hákon Huijbens, former Director at the Icelandic Tourism Research Centre for reviewing my work in Iceland. Also I would like to add a special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their very valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.