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International development

11. Work done in the past, and currently being undertaken, by international organisations, and in particular by the World Tourism Organisation (WTO) and the United Nations Statistical Office (UNSO), has made a significant contribution to addressing the lack of common standards. In many areas, international standard classification systems and definitions have been developed and established. In particular, the publication by the UN/WTO of new standards in the 'Recommendations on Tourism Statistics' in 1994, following the ratification of these standards by the United Nations Statistical Commission in 1993, represents a major advance. The recent work by the WTO on development of the Standard International Classification of Tourism Activities (SICTA) also constituted a major development.

12. This Framework draws on the work done in these areas, and takes it a stage further by developing a structure which brings it together in an integrated package. This package provides the linkages between the various data required. It also provides a formalised structure which, based on standard international classifications, enables linkage of tourism data with data on other industries and other subject-matter areas. Where relevant, the international standards are adapted to provide standards more appropriate for Australia.

Development of the Framework

13. For the Framework to achieve its potential contribution to the development of tourism statistics it must be such as to command general acceptance within the tourism statistics community. It must provide guidelines which are relevant, practical and useable. The emphasis, therefore, in developing the Framework has been to produce a practical working document, rather than a theoretical model. In some cases it is necessary to compromise between what should ideally be collected and what can practically be collected. For any statistical collection exercise, the final decision on how much detail to collect, and what degree of accuracy is achieved, will depend on a number of practical issues, such as the design, mode of collection, sample size, and of course, the purpose of the collection.

14. As development of tourism statistics standards is continuing at the international and national levels, this Framework needs to be under continuous development to reflect such advances. It could also be expanded, for example, to cover more specifically outbound tourism, to include indirect suppliers of tourism products or to discuss appropriate collection methodologies. While there is considerable activity in the area of development of tourism economic impact models, particularly of tourism satellite accounts, this is not covered in this Framework, being seen as development of economic research methods rather than development of statistical standards.