(June, 2000)
Although there is consensus that tourism plays an important role in Egypt’s economy, evidence to support this intuition is not readily available. Despite the country’s ample supply of fairly detailed information on tourists’ arrivals, nationalities, and their average expenditures, there is only limited and sometimes misleading information on the contribution of this sector to variables such as aggregate demand, employment and income.

This Policy Viewpoint aims to address this weakness in tourism data by highlighting some of the major limitations of the information currently available and offering an alternative measurement of the impact of tourism on the Egyptian economy. The study will quantitatively assess the contribution of foreign tourists’ expenditures to aggregate demand, value-added, employment and income in Egypt.