A.2. Sources

6.12.                  Information on industries, their output, inputs and employment, is gathered mainly through surveys, which NSOs usually conduct on a yearly basis, covering all economic activities. The economic data thus collected are usually required for calculating the country’s National Accounts, for example, gross domestic product and gross value added. 

6.13.                  The surveys are currently well established and have a standardized format, based on International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) categories (e.g., agriculture, mining and manufacturing). 

6.14.                  Census or administrative data used to ensure that the business registers is up to date and support the survey design. If not appropriately updated, these registers will generate biases in the estimation of actual changes over time, mainly when activity is concentrated in small units of production. As previously noted, in the case of tourism, these business registers might or might not be tied to a specific licensing procedure for activities mainly dedicated to serving visitors (see Eurostat‑OECD, Manual on Business Demography Statistics). 

6.15.                  These surveys often concentrate on larger units, with thresholds expressed in terms of annual income, capital or employment. This design generates structural underrepresentation and underestimation of activities (and sub‑activities) in cases where small units predominate (which is the case for some tourism industries, especially those engaged in food service, and local land transportation). In some countries, these surveys also tend to concentrate on large, industrial cities, whereas tourism is distributed differently within the economic territory, which needs to be taken into consideration. 

6.16.                  The content of the questionnaires needs to be adapted to the different activities to be observed and to their specific characteristics. Accommodation providers, for instance, often include various items in the bill that are additional to the product actually purchased (e.g., a headcount, a sales tax or a VAT as a percentage of total consumption, and a proportional compulsory service charge). Visitors may also choose to add tips. All of these payments count as part of the value of consumption, but providers usually do not include them as income in their financial statements, treating them instead as income received on behalf of others. Taxes and headcounts, for example, are collected for governments (local or central); service charges and tips usually go to workers, as employee compensation. In measuring supply, taxes on the product will need to be excluded; tips and service charges, on the other hand, will need to be included, as part of value added and remuneration of employees. 

6.17.                  UNWTO[1] suggested that certain administrative records should also be used for tourism, including information produced by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) on flows of international visitors. Further, extensive research was conducted on the possible use of fiscal information (income tax and VAT invoices) and their combination with business registers, or use as a source for updating registers and obtaining specific additional information, inter alia, on income, costs and employment. This was based on the experience of many countries (including Canada, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, the United Kingdom or Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America). 

6.18.                  The use of administrative records is particularly important and recommended as a best practice in statistical procedures: such records can be collected free of charge and no additional burden is created for respondents, the burden on respondents being a sensitive issue in most countries. 

6.19.                  It must be observed that in setting up the STS, compilers will generate new sources of information, work more carefully with existing sources and draw up on all useful information available from the National Statistical System (NSS). Information processed to build the National Accounts will be particularly useful, since it has already been subjected to consistency checks and integrated within a supply‑and‑use framework. 

6.20.                  For many activities – such as food service, certain forms of transport, tourist guide services, handicrafts and even accommodation – a multiplicity of informal providers are often excluded from business registers, and thus overlooked by traditional observation systems. National Accounts compilers need to estimate their activity nonetheless. Sometimes there are options available for collecting data on production in informal enterprises, e.g., a household survey may provide a means of collecting information on production by household enterprises that are not included in the sampling frames of business registers (see also 2008 SNA, chap. 25, entitled "Informal aspects of the economy"). These estimations are closer to what the STS seeks to measure. Such estimates will also be useful in compiling a TSA.