Tourism Revenues Keep Making Major GDP Contribution to Caribbean Islands

Tourism Revenues Keep Making Major GDP Contribution to Caribbean Islands

St Lucia receives annual tourism revenues in excess of 31 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), while in Bahamas and Antigua and Barbuda tourists spend the equivalent of 29 percent of these countries’ GDP.

Those three Caribbean nations top the list for the share of inbound visitor consumption in the region, according to data published today by ECLAC in its publication ‘Latin America and the Caribbean: macroeconomic indicators for tourism’.

The tourism sector plays a crucial role in many of the region’s economies, in terms of job creation and production, as well as currency generation and the ECLAC document shows the economic importance of this sector in a given country and assesses some of its main characteristics.

Although for Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole, tourism revenues represent 1.8 percent of GDP (period 1980-2008), for the Caribbean sub region in particular this percentage is 16.6 percent.

In Central American countries, the average figure is five percent (1980-2009), while for some South American countries the proportion was almost four percent for the same period.

The ECLAC report presents the main Latin American and Caribbean results of a project to formulate indicators for the macroeconomic analysis of tourism at the world level, which is being carried out in conjunction with the World Tourism Organization of the United Nations.

The macroeconomic indicators included in this document relate to international tourism, which means revenues that a country receives for the export of tourist services (inbound tourism) and the spending carried out by the country’s residents to import tourism services (outbound tourism).