International tourist expenditure abroad
What you should know about this indicator
- Expenditures associated with international visitors are traditionally categorized under the travel item of the Balance of Payments (BOP). For inbound tourism, these expenses are recorded as "credits" in the BOP and referred to as "travel receipts".
- It's important to note that BOP estimates also include expenditures related to other types of travelers, such as long-term students, patients, border workers, and seasonal workers, which can be substantial in some countries.
- When reporting a time series of expenditure, comparing observations across time without adjusting for inflation may not yield meaningful results. This is because prices change over time due to factors such as inflation.
- In order to enable comparisons across different time periods, it is necessary to consider the impact of price changes.
- In the context of this indicator, where there is no breakdown of the destinations where tourists spend their money on travel activities, the data has been adjusted for inflation using the US Consumer Price Index (CPI).
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
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At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: International tourist expenditure abroad”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre and Veronika Samborska (2023) - “Tourism”. Data adapted from UNWTO, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-expenditures-of-tourists-abroad [online resource]
How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
UNWTO (2024); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024) – processed by Our World in Data
Full citation
UNWTO (2024); U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024) – processed by Our World in Data. “International tourist expenditure abroad” [dataset]. UNWTO, “145 key tourism statistics”; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “US consumer prices” [original data]. Retrieved November 3, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-expenditures-of-tourists-abroad