Methods for the Redistribution of Tourist Expenditure in Spain: From EGATUR to Reallocation Matrices

Abstract

[Abstract] To estimate the expenditures made by foreign visitors in Spain, the National Statistics Institute (INE) produces the "Tourist Expenditure Survey'' (EGATUR), which allocates all spending to the main destination region, even if it was not fully carried out there. Consequently, there arises a need to redistribute expenditure across the Autonomous Communities actually visited, for which we rely on supplementary information from transactions with foreign bank cards. Our proposal is to estimate a reallocation matrix whose elements allow the redistribution of expenditure from the main destination regions to all those effectively visited. Several approaches are explored, including constrained least squares, overnight-stay proportion matrices, and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), among others.