Efforts to assess the economic significance of tourism in the Philippines have been carried out since 1988 when the NSCB, thru its Grants-in-Aid statistical development program provided funds
and technical assistance to the DOT in conducting a study which found that using input-output analysis, tourism accounted for 2.8 percent of the economy in 1987.4 In 1996, the NSCB and DOT
started collaborating with the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) to come up with a simulated satellite account on tourism for the Philippines, which showed that travel and tourism accounted for 8.7 percent of the GDP in 1997. It was during this collaboration that the NSCB created an Inter-Agency Committee on the Development of a Satellite Account on Tourism (IAC-DSAT) on January 27, 1997. And in July 1999, NSCB and DOT once again worked in partnership to undertake a project to operationalize the TSA framework of the World Tourism Organization (WTO), which produced interim results of the PTSA. This partnership led to the creation of a Development of a Satellite Account on Tourism (DSAT) Team.