| Summary: | The impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on economic development has been examined extensively in the academic literature. The positive effects of FDI generally hold if the host economies have sufficient level of development to absorb the benefits of FDI. However, the contribution of tourism FDI to economic development is largely unknown because of measurement difficulties in tourism FDI, data paucity and the relatively small scale of tourism FDI compared to total FDI flows. Host countries where tourism is one of the main or the only main income generating sector(s) often have a low level of development and rely heavily on tourism FDI. The low level of development in tourism intensive destinations makes the measurement of tourism impacts more difficult because there is often a high level of leakages from the tourism FDI in such economies. Therefore, then development of a clear and robust way of measuring the tourism FDI impact at such destinations has become important and necessary. This thesis uses the example of Wales, a relatively less developed region of the UK, to illustrate how the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) can be altered in form to reveal the contribution of tourism FDI on economic development in terms of output,gross value added (overall and per worker) and employment. The non-regionally owned tourism businesses supply over half of tourism products/services and create more GVA in total than regionally owned businesses. Employees in the non-regionally owned businesses also have much higher productivity. This study additionally shows the factors (such as quality of labour, household income level, leakages) that are considered important for economic development can be better accounted and understood by appending a Tourism Social Accounting Matrix (TSAM) to a TSA, with additional benefits for more comprehensive economic development impact analysis and further modelling.
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