Measuring the Impact of Foreign Tourism on Sectoral output in Iran's Economy - Social Accounting Matrix Approach

This study measures the impact of foreign tourism revenue on sectoral output growth and identifying its channels of economic impacts. For this purpose output multipliers and structural path analysis approaches in the social accounting matrix framework are employed. The most advantage of the structural path analysis is that provides a detailed technique of decomposing output multipliers and identifying a full network of path of economic influence from the origin sector to its ultimate destination. For this purpose main data bases are: the 2011 SAM of Parliament Research Center of Iran and the foreign inbound tourism revenue in 2017 in the absence of tourism satellite accounts in Iran.Results show foreign tourism revenue (28.2 thousands billion rials) has led to increased output of all economic sectors (62.1thousands billion rials), and total output multiplier is 2.31 unit, in which other services, wholesale and retail, and hotel sectors have received 13.71, 13.66, and 12.66 percent of the total output effects, respectively. The decomposition of output multiplier and structural path analysis results revealed that food, restaurant, road, rail and air transportation have the most direct paths and vice versa for the other related tourism sectors. Moreover, wholesale and retail, agriculture, road transportation, and other services play a significant role in influencing foreign tourists' incomes on the Iranian economy.