Estimating Tourism's Share Of Local Income From Secondary Data Sources

Typically, primary survey data is necessary to gauge the scale of local tourism. This paper proposes an alternative method for generating county-level estimates of employee compensation attributable to tourism based on secondary data sources. The procedure used principal components and cluster analyses to establish regions matched by tourism structure. Minimum requirements was then used to estimate the share of employee compensation attributable to non-local demand. The procedure was applied to Wisconsin counties to estimate tourism shares attributable to travelers and recreational home owners. The principal components analysis showed that Wisconsin tourism is driven by variable combinations of three components: urban tourism, outdoor-based activities, and natural parks/specialty tourism. Minimum requirements generated county-level estimates of non-local demand for disaggregated tourism-sensitive business sectors. Tourism shares ranged from approximately 3 percent of total employee compensation within the urban clusters to about 10 percent in the nature and parks clusters.