Issues in the estimation of the interregional tourism expenditure in Italy

The tourism industry is becoming one of the largest economic agent in many countries. This is true especially in Italy where, in some regions, the share of tourism expenditure accounts for more than 10% of the whole household domestic consumption. Therefore, the decomposition of the tourism expenditure into the interregional and foreign components is of crucial importance, as the corresponding flows are relevant entries of the input-output table of domestic consumption. A common issue when modelling the entries of an input-output table is the discrepancy between the aggregated values corresponding to row and column marginal totals. This is due to the fact that information (a) comes from different sources and (b) refers to entities that are differently defined. This issue has been addressed for linear modelling in Falocci et al. (2007). In this paper we present some strategies for the estimation of interregional tourism expenditure, which makes use of their methods.