The Economic Contribution of Tourism Sector.

This paper presents a methodology for measuring the contribution of the tourism sector to an economy's performance in terms of GDP and growth. The method uses the rate of growth of real per capita GDP and disaggregates it into a growth component corresponding to tourism and growth generated by other industries. It is applied to two groups of countries, one including economies with established destinations and a group of Latin American. The comparison shows that the tourism contribution to GDP is higher for the first group but it is not associated necessarily with a greater contribution to the economy's growth.