Some recent trends in the tourism business in Asia are worth noting. They confirm once again that the northern part of the region is doing better than the south.
It is clearly apparent from recent figures on visitor arrivals which show that year-on-year growth in arrivals has once again returned to Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea with the figures for August showing a 6.5 per cent improvement over the previous year on a three-month average basis.
Most of this, of course, is attributable to Hong Kong, which saw visitor arrivals collapse in July last year just after the handover. The figures for July this year saw a 26 per cent jump over the low base of that previous July but have since levelled off again.
Nonetheless, the worst now seems over and Taiwan and Korea are also showing firming levels of visitor arrivals.
Countries comprising the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) continue to do poorly in attracting visitors. The latest figures still show arrivals declining by 10 per cent year-on-year.
Arrivals from North America, Europe and Oceania are growing slowly in absolute terms but more rapidly as a proportion of total arrivals. There is now a greater Caucasian element in tourism.
Visitors from other Asian countries including Japan still constitute the largest bulk of total arrivals but they are declining in number and dropping even faster as a proportion of the total.
It all reflects the obvious trends of which countries are doing better in economic and currency performance and which are doing worse. One other way of looking at the figures is to explore how important tourism now is to the economies of Asia.
The best way would be to collect accurate and up-to-date figures on tourist expenditure in each country but, unfortunately, these are available from only a few countries and are still inexact.
The alternative is to measure it in terms of visitor arrivals per million dollars of gross domestic product. This requires using constant price GDP, US dollar 1995 prices here, because the nominal measure would distort such comparison figures as numbers of visitors, which are not stated in prices of the day. My apologies to those readers who don't quite follow this technical detail but there will be e-mail requests to explain the basis of GDP comparison if I don't do it here.
The result indicates that the importance of tourism to GDP is almost exactly the same as it was 10 years ago. For Asia excluding Japan and the mainland (which has figures going back only four years) there were 1.99 visitors for every million US dollars of GDP in the 12 months to June this year. In June 1988, the equivalent figure was 1.97.
So much for all the expensive tourist campaigns staged across the region over the past 10 years. Perhaps there would have been fewer visitors if billions of dollars had not been spent to attract them but tourism has only barely kept up with GDP growth. And perhaps GDP would have been greater now if that money had been put to other uses.