Improving the reliability of international tourism statistics

Anthony Edwards' recent study “The Reliability of Tourism Statistics ”in Travel & Tourism Analyst [Edwards 1991 in References below] is timely, coming before the WTO International Conference on Travel and Tourism Statistics (Ottawa, June 25–28, 1991) and the Meeting on Tourism Statistics at the International Statistical Institute's 38th Session (together with the International Association for Official Statistics, Cairo, September 1991). He is one of the most expert users and analysts of these problematic data. Both WTO [1985] and OECD [1982, 1984] published methodological reports on the main national statistics they publish. A recent book [Bar‐On 1989a], three articles in The Tourist Review [Bar‐On 1983, 1988] and in International Tourism Quarterly [Withyman 1985] and a paper at the Beijing Conference of IAOS [Bar‐On 1990] discussed many of the problems and solutions, and they were covered at the Crete Europa Conference [Schmidhauser 1991]. The following should interest readers producing or analysing tourism data: