Edward Hasbrouck's blog Main Wednesday, 22 October 2003 International tourism to the USA still falling Yesterday the USA Department of Commerce released its latest revised Forecast of International Travel to the United States , with actual, estimated, and predicted numbers of visitors from each regioin of the world for 2001 through 2007. Despite the upbeat tone of the DOC press release announcing the latest revisons, the real story in the statistics is that the USA is bucking the global trend: while travel in the rest of the world has been recovering, international travel to the USA has continued to decline each year since 2000 this will be the third successive year that international visitor numbers in the USA have been less than the prior year. The USA is one of the world's most popular destinations. Inbound international tourists spent US $7 billion more in the USA in 2002 than Americans spent abroad, making tourism the largest single contributor in the services sector of the economy to the USA balance of payments. Keeping would-be visitors from coming here and spending their money is enormously costly, as well as difficult. But that hasn't kept the Homeland Security Department from giving it the old college try, with remarkable (and unfortunate) resuts. Around the world, the | |
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