Tourism: the measurement of economic and social impact

This paper identifies the need to consider the impact of tourism as an economic and social activity in any broad assessment of the impacts of tourism developments. A number of factors must be accounted for in measuring such impacts, which derive from the nature of the tourism activity, eg tourism is a dynamic agent of change, it is an amalgam of a number of industrial activities, it occurs within distinctive contexts etc. The question therefore centres on the methodology employed to measure the distribution of the costs and benefits of tourism.