Tourism is a major export earner for Australia, a source of employment for hundreds of thousands of workers and a key driver of growth in the economy. Unlike many other industries which are concentrated in geographic pockets, the benefits of tourism are widespread, with almost half of all expenditure going into regional Australia.
Tourism is also an industry that cuts across many sectors of the Australian economy — retail trade, accommodation, transport and food services being the most obvious examples. As a result, tourism does not fit within conventional frameworks used to measure economic activity. For this reason, tourism satellite accounts have been created to quantify the differing contributions from other industries, and to estimate the value of the visitor economy.