Special Issue Article

Tourism Economics
2016, Vol. 22(6) 1301–1314
Greenhouse gas emissions ª The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permission:

from tourist activities in sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1354816616669008
te.sagepub.com
South Tyrol: A multiregional
input–output approach
Mattia Cai
Free University of Bolzano/Bozen, Italy

Abstract
Tourism is a non-negligible source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Using South Tyrol (ST) – a
small region with a tourism-intensive economy situated in the North of Italy – as a case study, this
article discusses a multiregional input–output (MRIO) framework for calculating the direct and
indirect emissions embodied in tourist consumption of goods and services at a subnational level.
Compared to more standard single-region implementations of the input–output approach, MRIO
analysis offers a more accurate depiction of the amount of emissions, that is, embodied in imports,
because it acknowledges that in the modern economy supply chains often stretch across multiple
borders and that the carbon intensity of production can vary widely from one location to another.
Operationalizing the framework has become relatively straightforward since a number of new
global MRIO databases have become available in recent years. Furthermore, the analysis could
easily be extended to other environmental externalities of tourism, where the model’s capability
to explicitly account for spatial spillovers might also be of interest. The modelling exercise at the
heart of the article suggests that, over the course of 2010, the process of producing the goods and
services consumed by tourists in ST resulted in 1092 kt CO2e of GHGs being emitted into the
atmosphere. This is equivalent to average emissions of 191 kg CO2e per overnight visitor, 38 kg
CO2e per night or 0.316 kg per euro of tourist expenditure. Direct emissions account for about
one-fourth of the total. Almost four-fifths of total emissions appear to be the result of productive
activities sited outside ST itself.

Keywords
greenhouse gas emissions, Italy, multiregional input–output analysis, South Tyrol, tourism

Corresponding author:
Mattia Cai, Faculty of Economics and Management, Free University of Bolzano/Bozen, Piazzetta dell’Università/
Universitätsplatz 1, 39031 Brunico/Bruneck, Italy.
Email: mattia.cai@unibz.it
1302 Tourism Economics 22(6)

In order to limit the magnitude and rate of climate change and keep the risks associated with it
below acceptable levels, it is necessary to control the amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted
to the atmosphere as a result of human activities (IPCC, 2014). Implementing climate change
mitigation policies presupposes the ability to monitor emissions from those activities. In this
respect, tourism – which according to a widely cited estimate accounts for approximately 5%
global carbon emissions (UNWTO, 2008) – is certainly worth keeping an eye on.
This article discusses how to calculate the direct and indirect GHG emissions that result from
tourist consumption in a small destination within an input–output (IO) framework. Using South
Tyrol (ST), Italy, as a case study, it argues that a multiregional input–output (MRIO) approach has
the potential to yield more accurate results than the standard single-region approach and, given
rapidly improving data availability, lays only a small additional burden on the analyst.

Literature
The carbon footprint of a tourist destination
As recently as 2010, Dwyer et al. observed that ‘unfortunately there has been little attempt to
measure CO2 emissions associated with individual tourist destinations’. Even though several
destination-oriented studies of GHG emissions from tourism have appeared of late, research in this
area can still be considered in its early days.
From a methodological point of view, analyses of tourism GHG emissions have relied pre-
dominantly on two approaches. Some studies (e.g. de Bruijn et al., 2013; Gössling, 2013; Kelly and
Williams, 2007; Perch-Nielsen et al., 2010; Tang et al., 2015) combine business and visitor survey
data with technical and engineering information to develop inventories of all energy flows and
carbon emissions that result from certain tourist behaviours of interest. In the literature, this way of
proceeding is generally referred to as the bottom-up approach.
Alternatively, GHG emissions from tourism have been investigated taking a top-down approach. In
general, analyses of this kind link information about tourist expenditure – typically retrieved from a
tourism satellite account (TSA) – with macroeconomic and environmental data available from official
sources. In general, tourism-related carbon emissions are calculated within a theoretical framework,
whose origins can be traced to Leontief’s (1970) work on environmental IO analysis. Examples of this
approach can be found in Cadarso et al. (2016), Dwyer et al. (2010), Jones and Munday (2007), Konan
and Chan (2010), Munday et al. (2013), Sun (2014) and Whittlesea and Owen (2012).
Because of the highly aggregated nature of national and territorial accounting data, the top-
down approach cannot achieve as fine a degree of process detail as the bottom-up approach.
Furthermore, any analysis based on the IO model is potentially affected by the familiar limitations
of the method (Briassoulis, 1991; Dwyer et al., 2004; Klijs et al., 2015). On the other hand, since it
relies on existing statistical information and standardized procedures, the IO top-down approach is
transparent, easily replicable and relatively inexpensive to implement. In addition, the results are
more readily comparable across regions and industries because the underlying macroeconomic
data reflect established accounting conventions.
In the context of tourism carbon footprint calculations, the main appeal of IO models is their
capability to keep track of all indirect GHG emissions. In other words, besides the emissions that
arise in the production of the final goods and services directly purchased by the tourists, it is
also possible to systematically take into account the emissions associated with the intermediate
products employed upstream in the supply chain.
Cai 1303

This feature of IO models greatly simplifies that task of defining system boundaries, which is
generally a major practical issue in bottom-up studies (Hendrickson et al., 2006). Furthermore, it
makes IO models naturally suited to address questions about the amount of GHG emissions
embodied in trade (Minx et al., 2009; Wiedmann, 2009).

The GHG emissions embodied in imports

As the global economy has become increasingly integrated, many resource-intensive productive
activities are carried out in countries other than those where the final products are consumed. It has
been suggested that societies should take responsibility for the emissions associated with the
production of what they consume rather than for what they produce (e.g. see the discussion in Eder
and Narodoslawsky, 1999 and Munksgaard and Pedersen, 2001). Under a consumer responsibility
principle, tourism in a certain destination should be accountable for all its direct and indirect
emissions irrespective of where they originate.
In existing IO studies of the tourism carbon footprint, emissions embodied in trade have pre-
dominantly been handled in one of two ways. In some cases (e.g. Jones and Munday, 2007; Konan
and Chan, 2010), they are placed outside the system boundaries and consequently ignored. By
contrast, other studies (e.g. Munday et al., 2013; Sun, 2014) compute emissions embodied in trade
using IO data from the region that lies at the centre of the analysis, under the simplifying
assumption that the world economy produces its outputs by means of the same technology as the
region in question. This assumption – which is known as the domestic technology assumption –
greatly reduces the data requirements of the model and is often forced on the analyst by a lack of
adequate IO information to characterize the technology by which imports are produced.
It is apparent, however, that under general circumstances, the domestic technology assumption
should not be expected to be especially accurate. For a start, in practice, it is often possible to produce
the same output by means of different technologies that vary widely in terms of their environmental
implications. A very dramatic example is provided by electricity generation. Technology options
range from essentially carbon-free solar photovoltaic and wind to carbon-intensive fossil fuels and
there are indeed remarkable differences among the energy mixes of different countries.
In addition, even if a one-to-one relationship could be established between products and tech-
nologies, the degree of aggregation in a typical IO table is such that in practice the same industry
identifier corresponds to a different mix of products in different countries. Thus, for example,
livestock and crop production could be lumped together into a single industry under the header
‘agriculture’. If two regions differ in terms of the mix of livestock and crops they produce, their
agricultural sectors are likely to have different input requirements and GHG emission intensities.
Such problems are likely to be particularly serious when the focus of the analysis is a
small region.
Since a number of global MRIO data sets have become available in recent years (e.g. Andrew
and Peters, 2013; Dietzenbacher et al., 2013; Lenzen et al., 2013), the domestic technology
assumption has become by no means inescapable.
This article aims to demonstrate that, even at a subnational level, it is often possible to undertake
truly MRIO analyses of the tourism carbon footprint that address emissions embodied in trade and
explicitly account for heterogeneity in regional production technologies. While countless uses of
IO analysis are documented in the tourism economics literature, to the best of the author’s
knowledge, only very few applications take a multiregional perspective (Lamonica and Mattioli,
2015; Soulie and Valle, 2014).
1304 Tourism Economics 22(6)

Case study
A small border region in the Alps, South Tyrol (ST) has a population of about half a million
inhabitants – a majority of whom are native German speakers – and a sizeable tourism sector,
whose direct contribution to the economy amounts to 11% of regional value added (Astat, 2012).
The carbon footprint of tourism is of concern not only for substantive environmental policy reasons
but also for commercial purposes, as environmental sustainability plays an important part in the
destination’s marketing mix.
In order to calculate the amount of GHG emissions that result directly and indirectly from
tourist consumption of goods and services in the region, an environmentally extended MRIO
model was constructed by linking ST’s IO table with the publicly available World Input Output
Database (WIOD) developed by Timmer et al. (2015).
The model is activated by a tourist demand vector compiled from TSA data (Astat, 2012). This
has important implications with regard to the system boundaries of the analysis. Transportation to,
from and within the destination contributes to GHG emission calculations only to extent that it
shows up as tourist expenditure in the TSA. In the case of private cars, which are by far the most
common mode for tourists to reach and move around the region (Brida and Risso, 2009), this
means that only locally purchased fuel is taken into account. Furthermore, the calculations reported
in this article only consider those GHG emissions that are created in the production of the fuel but
not those that arise from using the fuel (Dwyer et al., 2010).

Methods
MRIO modelling of GHG emission from tourism
Consider an economy consisting of n industries, each of which produces a certain commodity as its
distinctive output. Let f ¼ ½f1 ; f2 ; . . . ; fn 0 denote an observed column vector that describes tourist
demand for the economy’s products in terms of those commodities. Using standard results from IO
analysis, the amount of the various commodities that the economy needs to produce in order to
meet tourists’ demand can be computed as:
x ¼ ðI  AÞ1 f; ð1Þ
where I is a suitably sized identity matrix and A is a known square matrix of input coefficients,
whose generic entry aij represents the amount of commodity i that is required in order to produce
one unit of commodity j.
Suppose that industry i is known to emit a certain quantity, ei , of GHGs per unit of output. Then
the amount of pollution generated by industry i in order to meet tourists’ use of commodities can be
straightforwardly computed as ei xi . The resulting estimate of total GHG emissions, e0 x, takes into
account not only those emissions that are generated directly in the production of the final goods
consumed by the tourists (e.g. a restaurant meals) – those direct emissions can be found as e0 f – but
also those that indirectly arise upstream in the supply chain when the intermediate goods (e.g. the
agricultural and food products that went into that meal) are produced.
In this article, GHG emissions associated with tourism are estimated using such an IO
approach. The analysis, however, is carried out using a spatially disaggregated modelling
framework in which commodities are further distinguished according to the location where
they are produced.
Cai 1305

Specifically, it is assumed that the economy consists of m regions. The exogenous demand
vector is nm  1 and takes the form:
2 13
f
6 f2 7
f¼6 7
4 .. 5:
.
fm
For r ¼ 1; . . . m, the vector f r represents tourist demand for products from region r. Its generic
element, fir , denotes tourist demand for commodity i produced in region r.
The input coefficients of the model are given by the following nm  nm partitioned matrix:
2 11 3
A A12    A1m
6A 21 22 2m
A  A 7
A¼6 4 ... .. .. .. 7 :
. . . 5
Am1 Am2 ... Amm
A generic block Ars describes the requirements of productive activities in region s in terms of
inputs from region r. Its typical entry ars
ij represents the amount of commodity i from region r that is
needed in order to produce one unit of commodity j in region s.
Given knowledge of f and A, the corresponding nm  1 output vector x ¼ ½ x1 0 x2 0 . . . xm0 0
is obtained using equation (1). A generic element (xri ) of xr measures how much commodity
i produced in region r is necessary in order to meet the demands of tourists.
Finally, commodity output levels are translated into estimates of GHG emissions using a vector
0
of regional specific emission factors, e ¼ ½ e1 0 e2 0 . . . em0  . Each element, eri , of er repre-
sents the amount of GHG emissions that is generated in the production of a unit amount of
commodity i in region r.
Evidently, the data requirements are much heavier for a MRIO than for a single region model.
An account of what data sources were used and how A, f and e were constructed in the present
empirical implementation of the MRIO model can be found in the following two subsections.

Data sources
Two main data sources were used to compile the MRIO coefficient matrix of the model: ST’s
IO table (Astat, 2013) and the world IO database produced by the WIOD project (Timmer
et al., 2015).
The model was built using 2010 data and is grounded in the same 35-industry aggregation of the
NACE revision 1.1 classification as the WIOD tables (Timmer et al., 2012). For ease of reporting,
however, all results were subsequently aggregated into seven industry aggregates as documented in
Table 1.
Logically, the ST table is valued in euro. By contrast, all monetary information from the WIOD
project is reported in US dollars. The two data sets were converted to homogenous currency units
using the exchange rate (1.3257 USD/EUR) provided in the WIOD database.
Furthermore, because ST’s 2010 IO data are organized according to a more recent revision
of NACE, they had to be reclassified to the older version of the classification used by the
WIOD project. More information about how this step was carried out is available upon request
from the author.
1306 Tourism Economics 22(6)

Table 1. Industry aggregations.

Industry aggregates NACE rev. 1.1 codes

Agriculture and food A, B, DA

Manufacturing DB, DC, DD, DE, DF, DG, DI, DH, DJ, DK, DL DM, DN, F
Energy and mining C, E
Trade services G
Hotels and restaurants H
Transport I
Other services K, L, M, N, O, P

Finally, data on GHG emissions for ST were obtained from the Italian statistical agency, Istat.
For the remaining regions of the model, GHG emission data were extracted from the WIOD
database, which is comprised of complete industry-level data on emissions for all the main air
pollutants. Methane and nitrous oxide emissions are converted to their CO2 equivalent using the
100-year global warming potential (IPCC, 2013).

Empirical implementation
The MRIO model developed for this application consists of four regions: (1) ST, the Italian
province that constitutes the focus of the analysis; (2) the rest of Italy (ITA); (3) a composite
German-speaking region that results from the aggregation of Germany and Austria (GER); and
(4) a residual rest of the World region (RoW). The choice of this degree of spatial disaggregation is
partly dictated by data availability constraints but reflects the economic reality that ITA and GER
are by far the regions that ST is most tightly connected to.
Given the available information, the multiregional A matrix was compiled as follows.
Whenever r; s 2 fITA; GER; RoWg, the interregional input coefficients the block Ars can be
straightforwardly obtained from the WIOD database. Indeed, since ST only accounts for an
extremely small share of the Italian economy, there is no practically relevant inaccuracy
involved in characterizing the rest of the country region, ITA, with coefficients obtained from
data referred to the entire country.
The elements of A that pertain to ST, on the other hand, have to be constructed from information
that can be found in the (single-region) ST IO table. Consider the block Ar;ST for a given r. The
natural way of computing its generic element ar;ST ij requires knowledge of how much commodity i
from region r was used in the production process of commodity j in ST during the reference year.
Unfortunately, this kind of information cannot be obtained from a single region IO table of region
ST. Instead, what can be easily constructed from ST’s IO table is a technical coefficient, denoted
aST
ij , which describes the amount of commodity i required to produce a unit amount of commodity j
in ST, irrespective of where that commodity i is sourced from.
Also, the IO table contains information about what share of P all commodity i used in region ST
comes from region r. Let this share be denoted as cr;ST
i . Clearly, cr;ST ¼ 1 for any given i. Like
r i
ST;ST
the technical coefficient aSTij , the trade coefficients ci and cITA;ST
i are easily computed from
information that is reported in ST’s IO table. Then, under the simplifying assumption that all of
ST’s foreign imports are sourced from GER, the remaining trade coefficients are cGER;STi ¼
ST;ST ITA;ST RoW;ST
1  ci  ci and ci ¼ 0.
Cai 1307

Following a standard procedure in MRIO modelling (Miller and Blair, 2009), the elements of
Ar;ST are computed as ar;ST
ij ¼ cr;ST
i aST
ij . In matrix notation:

Ar;ST ¼ ^c r;ST AST ; ð2Þ

where c r;ST
¼ ðcr;ST
1 ; cr;ST
2 ; cr;ST
... ;n Þ and a superimposed circumflex denotes diagonalization
into a matrix with all off-diagonal entries equal to zero. The matrix AST collects the technical
coefficients aST
ij .
At this stage, the only blocks of A that remain to be estimated are those that take the form AST;r
with r 2 fITA; GER; RoWg. Those describe the use of commodities produced in ST by the other
three economies. Because in relative terms, ST’s economy is extremely small, each of those
coefficients can be safely assumed to be negligible and set equal to zero. In the literature, this is
generally referred to as the small country assumption.
Besides the A matrix, computing an estimate of the GHG emissions associated with tourism in
ST requires two additional pieces of information: the vector of tourist demand, f, and the vector of
emission factors, e.
Owing to the importance of tourism for the regional economy, demand by tourists is reported in
ST’s IO table as a separate final use item. Let g ¼ ðg1 ; g2 ; . . . ; gn Þ be the column vector that
describes tourist use of the various commodities in the destination as reported in the IO table. Then,
by analogy with equation (2), the quantity that is supplied from region r is modelled as:
f r ¼ ^c r;ST g; ð3Þ
for all r.
Finally, while GHG emission factors for the three regions ITA, GER and RoW can simply be
extracted from the WIOD database, obtaining GHG emission factors for ST is more challenging.
The Italian statistical office does not routinely produce spatially disaggregated environmental
accounts. The only existing industry-based GHG emission data for Italian regions date back to
2005. As carbon intensity of the economic activities has been steadily declining in recent years
(Figure 1), emission coefficients that reflect 2005 technology have the potential to result in seri-
ously inflated carbon intensity estimates. To circumvent the problem, the 2005 regional GHG
emission data are updated to 2010 using the RAS algorithm (Miller and Blair, 2009) to exploit
information that is more recent but lacks the necessary spatial and industry detail.

Results
Over the course of 2010, ST received about 5.7 million overnight visitors for a total of 28.6
million nights. In that period, according to ST’s IO table, tourist expenditure in the region
amounted to approximately €3.46 billion. Unsurprisingly, the hotel and restaurant industry,
which accounts for roughly 62% of the total, is the largest contributor (Table 2). Other important
expenditure items include transport, agriculture and food, as well as trade services. As regards
the geographical origin of tourist purchases, locally produced goods and services appear to
account for four-fifths of total expenditure.
It should be clear from the previous discussion of the MRIO approach that the trade coefficients
in the rightmost columns of Table 2 are not specific to tourist purchases but reflect trade patterns
observed for the entire regional economy. In this respect, it is important to observe that ST imports
a dominant share of its uses of carbon or energy intensive products such as agricultural and
manufactured products.
1308 Tourism Economics 22(6)

0.7

CO2 emissions (kg per PPP $ of GDP) 0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

2011
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
Italy Germany Austria World

Figure 1. Carbon intensity of GDP for selected economies.

Source: World Development Indicators, The World Bank.

Table 2. Tourist expenditure in ST, 2010.

% Sourced from

Industry aggregate Tourist expenditure (million €) ST ITA GER

Agriculture and food 233.6 28 53 18

Manufacturing 122.5 24 48 28
Energy and mining 12.1 92 5 3
Trade services 475.7 65 23 12
Hotels and restaurants 2132.3 93 5 2
Transport 200.7 69 23 7
Other services 283.1 77 20 3
Total 3460.1 80 14 6

Source: Author’s calculation based on data from Astat.

Note: ST: South Tyrol; ITA: Italy; GER: Germany.

When it comes to estimating the amount of GHGs emitted to the atmosphere in the process of
producing the goods and services purchased by tourists, inspection of the emission factor data
(Figure 2) suggests that taking the geographical origin of products into proper consideration is of
crucial importance, because the carbon intensity of a productive activity can vary widely from one
region to another. For example, the energy industry of ST, where 92% of electricity is generated
from hydropower (Astat, 2014), is characterized by a remarkably small emission factor. By
contrast, the energy sectors of the GER and RoW regions, where fossil fuels play a more significant
role, emit much larger quantities of carbon per unit of output.
The MRIO modelling exercise at the heart of this article suggests that, in total, the process of
producing the goods and services consumed by tourists in ST over the course of 2010 resulted in
Cai 1309

2.0
ST
kg of CO2 equivalent per $ of output

ITA
GER
RoW
1.5
1.0
0.5
0.0

Agriculture Energy Trade Hotels Other

and food Manufacturing and mining services and restaurants Transport services

Figure 2. Direct GHG emissions factors by industry and region.

Source: Author’s calculation based on data from Astat, Istat and WIOD. GHG: greenhouse gas; WIOD: World Input Output
Database.

1092 kt CO2e of GHGs being emitted into the atmosphere. This is equivalent to average emissions
of 191 kg CO2e per overnight visitor, 38 kg CO2e per night or 0.316 kg per euro of tourist
expenditure. While the magnitude of these results seems broadly consistent with the findings of
other analyses of tourism-related GHG emissions that can be found in the literature (e.g. Jones and
Munday, 2007), accurate comparisons are made difficult by the fact that existing studies vary
remarkably in their definitions of system boundaries (e.g. to what extent they take into account
emissions resulting from transport or embodied in imports).
GHG emissions amounting to 279 kt CO2e originated directly in the production of the goods and
services for tourists. The remaining 813 kt CO2e are an indirect consequence of tourism con-
sumption as they are due to activities that took place upstream in the supply chain. Taken together,
agricultural and food production, the energy sector and manufacturing are responsible for almost
three-fourths of total emissions (Table 3).
Because only a small share of the energy intensive products that are used – directly or indirectly –
in ST’s tourism sector are produced within the region itself, interregional and international
imports account for as much as 79% of total supply chain emissions. Overall, 697 kt CO2e had
their source in Italy proper (i.e. in ST and ITA combined).
That a very significant portion of total emissions is due to the production of intermediate goods
outside ST emerges even more forcefully from Figure 3, where industry GHG emissions are further
broken down according to the region where they arise. Thus, about one-third of all tourism supply
chain emissions have their source in the RoW, even though the model structure is such that no trade
takes place directly between this region and ST.
Finally, an attempt is made to assess to what extent different modelling choices impact the
outcome of the analysis. How would the results be affected if a simpler set-up based on the
domestic technology assumption were used instead of a full-blown MRIO model?
1310 Tourism Economics 22(6)

Table 3. GHG emissions resulting from tourist consumption in ST, 2010.

GHG emissions (kt CO2e)

Domestic direct Domestic indirect Embodied

Industry aggregate effect effect in imports Total Percentage

Agriculture and food 27.2 34.0 315.6 376.7 35

Manufacturing 1.0 3.3 167.1 171.5 16
Energy and mining 0.7 4.3 244.9 249.9 23
Trade services 15.2 8.7 20.8 44.7 4
Hotels and restaurants 67.4 1.4 5.7 74.4 7
Transport 19.6 15.3 71.5 106.4 10
Other services 20.1 12.4 35.8 68.3 6
Total 151.1 79.5 861.4 1091.9 100
Percentage 14 7 79 100

Source: Author’s calculation based on data from Astat, Istat and WIOD.
Note: GHG: greenhouse gas; ST: South Tyrol.

Agriculture and food

Energy and mining

Manufacturing

Transport

Hotels and restaurants

Other services ST
ITA
GER
Trade services
RoW
0

100

200

300

400

GHG emissions (kt CO2e)

Figure 3. Total GHG emissions of ST’s tourism supply chain.

Source: Author’s calculation based on data from Astat, Istat and WIOD. GHG: greenhouse gas; WIOD: World Input Output
Database; ST: South Tyrol.

In order to answer this question, alternative sets of tourism emissions estimates were computed
utilizing three different implementations of the IO framework, all of which have relatively light
data requirements compared to the aforementioned four-region model. In each case, the model
consists of two regions, ST and a residual region, with the latter characterized by some version of
the domestic technology assumption.
The first of those alternative analyses (subsequently referred to as DTA-ST) is a straightforward
implementation of the domestic technology assumption in which only data from ST are used: both
Cai 1311

1000

800

861
600 604
kt CO2e

624 Embodied in imports

Domestic indirect effect
446
400 Domestic direct effect

169
200 79 79 79

151 158 151 151

0
DTA-ST DTA-ITA MRIO2 MRIO4

Figure 4. GHG emissions resulting from tourist consumption in ST: sensitivity analysis.
Source: Author’s calculation based on data from Astat, Istat and WIOD. ST: South Tyrol; GHG: greenhouse gas; WIOD:
World Input Output Database.

regions are assumed to produce their outputs using the technology described in ST’s IO table and
with GHG emission intensities observed in ST. The second model (DTA-ITA) only differs from
DTA-ST in that emission factors that relate to the Italian economy are used. The third analysis
(MRIO2) assumes that all production activities outside ST are carried out using Italian technology
and emission factors.
The results of the exercise are summarized in Figure 4 along with the GHG emission estimates
obtained from the four-region model (MRIO4). It is clear that ignoring how the world economy is
generally more carbon intensive than either ST’s or Italy’s often results in substantial under-
estimation of the amount of GHG emissions that is embodied in imports. In fact, the DTA-ITA
model produces an estimate of total emissions that is relatively close to that from MRIO4, but it
does so by drastically overstating the emissions of ST.

Conclusions
Any efforts to reduce or offset the GHG emissions caused by tourist activities in a destination must
contend with the difficulty of measuring those emissions. Using the Italian region of ST as an
example, this study has argued that the MRIO approach can contribute to a better understanding of
the tourism carbon footprint. Just like single-region IO models, MRIO models have the capability
to account for both direct and indirect GHG emissions within an extremely simple analytical
structure. In addition, however, the MRIO approach provides a coherent framework for handling
the indirect carbon emissions that are embodied in imported goods.
In tourism carbon footprint studies, GHG emissions that are created outside the region of
immediate interest have traditionally been either neglected or calculated under a domestic tech-
nology assumption. Assuming that the processes by which imported goods and services are
1312 Tourism Economics 22(6)

produced can be characterized using only statistical information from domestic sources con-
veniently reduces the data requirements of the model. Yet, in the case study discussed in this
article, the domestic technology assumption appears to introduce a disturbing amount of bias. This
does not appear to be a peculiarity of the empirical application in question, even though the
problem is probably exacerbated by the fact that the analysis focuses on a very small region.
As several global MRIO data sets are now freely available to researchers, building models that
allow for multiple regions with different production technologies and emission intensities has
become a more attractive proposition. This article argues that studies of tourism-related carbon
emissions should take advantage of this opportunity.
In addition to arguably improving the accuracy of tourism carbon footprint calculations,
the MRIO approach yields interesting predictions as to where carbon emissions are created.
Admittedly, GHGs are uniformly mixed pollutants and their global warming effects do not
depend on where their source is located. Nevertheless, developing a deeper understanding of
the regional and industry breakdown of GHG emissions can point to areas that would make
suitable targets for environmental policy interventions and hint at how changes in inter-
regional and international trade patterns could affect the overall GHG emission performance
of the tourism sector. For instance, the case study of ST examined in this article suggests that,
even though local policies aimed at improving energy efficiency in the hospitality sector or at
reducing the carbon intensity of agriculture have the potential to achieve non-negligible
decreases in GHG emissions from tourist activities, about four-fifths of those emissions are
outside the immediate control of local policymakers as they arise upstream in the supply chain
and outside the region itself.
It must be acknowledged that the empirical case study application discussed in this article has
some important limitations. Most notably, its treatment of private vehicles ends up ignoring a
dominant share of the GHG emissions resulting from tourist transportation. Even so, the analysis
demonstrates that implementing the MRIO approach at the subnational level is feasible under
fairly general data availability circumstances. As long as an IO table for the geographical area of
interest can be obtained, a MRIO model can be constructed by embedding that table into a world IO
table such as those produced by the WIOD project.
Furthermore, while this study uses an empirical MRIO implementation with only four territorial
aggregates, a more realistic representation of interregional trade flows could be obtained by
exploiting regional-level data on international trade in manufactured products, which in Italy are
readily available from official sources.
Yet, in spite of their limitations, simple modelling tools such as the one described in this article
provide a standardized and cost-effective way of carrying out GHG emission calculations. For
example, they could be proved useful in the process of calculating GHG emissions for the purpose
of voluntary carbon offsets. In addition, the analysis could easily be extended to other environ-
mental externalities of tourism besides those relating to climate change.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Cai 1313

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