ABSTRACT
Policy makers in the government need to know the magnitude of the impact of international and domestic tourist expenditures on the Israeli economy in order to make decisions about budget allocations for the development of tourist facilities. The Ministry of Tourism has conducted several studies on the volume of direct purchases of incoming and domestic tourists in various economic sectors and their regional distribution. This chapter aims to assess and estimate the extent of the contribution to GDP of the impacts of intra and interregional tourist expenditures. Estimation of tourism’s economic impact is complex because it entails an analysis of the direct purchases from several branches simultaneously. The results are expressed as multiregional input-output multipliers. Thus, the Multi-regional Input-Output Model takes into account the possible returns of the leakages and the impacts in other regions since it includes a multiregion trade flow matrix, thus evaluating the full impact.
