A TSA based input–output assessment of the economic impact of tourism on the Italian economy: an empirical application

Abstract This paper analyses the economic impact of tourism on the Italian economy through an integrated empirical application of Tourism Satellite Accounts (TSA) and Input–Output (IO) analysis. Rather than proposing a wholly new methodological framework, the study refines and applies established TSA-based IO integration techniques to the Italian case using official ISTAT data. Tourism is constructed as a composite sector by weighting economic branches according to TSA tourism coefficients and embedding them within the national IO system. This allows the estimation of output and value-added multipliers, as well as backward and forward linkages, in order to assess the sector’s intersectoral role within the Italian production structure. The findings indicate that tourism exhibits above-average dispersion effects and a solid capacity to activate production across the economy, although its forward integration within production chains remains comparatively limited. The contribution of the paper lies in providing a transparent and replicable empirical application for Italy, clarifying key assumptions underlying TSA–IO integration, and discussing the sensitivity of results to aggregation choices and tourism coefficients.