MU at Nara Tourism Statistics Week

MU president Prof. Karl Wöber and Prof. Egon Smeral were recently invited to Nara, Japan, to speak at Nara Tourism Statistics Week. Consisting of the 13th Global Forum on Tourism Statistics, co-organised by OECD and Eurostat, and the UNWTO Special Workshop on Tourism Statistics, the week gathered together an international group of researchers, academics and experts from international organizations and the private sector between November 17th and 21st.

The Global Forum on Tourism Statistics, held jointly by the OECD Tourism Committee and EUROSTAT, was established in 1994 and provides a regular opportunity for exchanging opinions relating to the development of industry statistics. Over the first two days of the week the forum consisted of four sessions on the themes of measurement and economic analysis of regional tourism, analysis of demand side behaviour and consumption, using big data for tourism statistics, and utilising tourism statistics for business and policy analysis.

At the latter session, Prof. Smeral presented his recent study, ‘’ The application of the TSA in a regional context: the case of Upper-Austria’’. He explained that that ‘’TSA, or Tourism Satellite Accounts, is an important tool for demonstrating the economic impact of tourism on a country and state level. A regional TSA (RTSA) offers the statistical base for theoretical as well as practical users to support their evaluations and analyses, providing a regionalized view of consumption by tourist.’’ His research focused on the federal state of Upper Austria to demonstrate the valuable information of a RTSA, which provides an analytical framework of issues related to tourism economics and tourism policy as well as for model building, tourism growth analysis, and productivity measurement.

Prof. Wöber had the honor to summarize three days proceedings of the Nara Tourism Statistics Week, recapping highlights such as a recent UNWTO study on the measurements of sustainable development indicators for international hotel chains and a recent OECD report on the measurement of tourism at sub-national level. Prof. Smeral summed up the last day’s events. T

he week was a great success, Prof. Wöber said ‘’The Nara Tourism Statistics week has shown that the sustainable development of regional tourism became a central topic of leading international organizations and I am happy that researchers at MODUL University Vienna had anticipated this development. ’’.

The 14th Global Forum on Tourism Statistics will be held in 2016.