DETERMINING THE ECONOMIC BENEFITS AND COSTS OF TRAVEL AND TOURISM

Travel and tourism are an integral part of people's lives. The displacement of people who have ever left their habitual environment has a strong impact on local, regional, national and international economies. As a branch of economy, tourism involves different kinds of economic costs and benefits. There are different problems of tourism development in different countries, but one of the important is to determine the economic benefits and costs of this industry. The purpose of the article is to consider various methods of estimation of economic benefits and expenses from travel and tourism, used in foreign practice. This review article discusses various approaches to estimating the economic benefits and costs of travel and tourism. The use of evaluation methods depends on the development of the tourism industry and the socio-economic characteristics of a region or country. Various methods are used to estimate the economic benefits and costs of travel and tourism, from simple guesses to complex mathematical models. The studies vary greatly in quality and accuracy, as well as in the included aspects of tourism. Having analyzed different methods, in our article we have stopped on the method of daily census and on the method of coefficients of «probability of use» as the most acceptable and simple in use. Such methods of scientific knowledge as analysis, synthesis, structuring, method of tables, induction, deduction, formalization, idealization, modeling were used in writing the article. The systematization of the data was obtained based on the study of scientific literature on a given topic. The relevance of the article lies in the fact that it is designed to help public authorities and businesses to assess the economic benefits and costs of new potential tourism facilities, to assess the economic feasibility of existing facilities and on this basis to develop public policy in the field of tourism.