The Tourism Satellite Account (TSA) is now widely used to examine the economic impact of tourism. The purpose of “TSA” is to analyze specific economic activities more completely than is possible within the System of National Accounts (SNA). The economic analysis of tourism requires the identification of the resources used by tourist on their trips, the consumption of goods and services that they acquire, and therefore the identification of the economic units that provide those goods and services. Both the demand and the supply perspectives are of particular importance. The paper, based on questionnaire survey conducted by the author at Tunisia airport, outlines the procedure for estimating Tunisian TSA, find out the value of direct and indirect tourism value added and show the size of tourism in Tunisian economy and the various industries related to tourism.

Recent cross-country studies have found that economic growth has weak correlation with educational attainment in their estimates. This paper assumes that the counterintuitive results can be attributed to heterogeneity of social returns on education and focus on little returns in low-income countries. People usually invest in education as income increases, but at the macro level, the data shows that low-income countries accumulate human capital unaccompanied by economic growth. It is probably because of a mass increase in those receiving education after gaining their independences in the 1960s, resulting in a different final schooling between the cohort entering into the adult population and the one leaving. Considering such historical socio-economic transformation in low-income countries during the recent half-century, I explore the impact of worldwide standardization of human capital accumulation in order to explain the phenomenon. The impact is defined as international external effect of education especially for low-income countries to accumulate human capital.

Using the panel data with 80 countries during the period 1970-2000, I estimate the impact of the externalities of education with Two Stage Least Squares. The results show the significant and positive effect of the international averaged human capital stock on educational attainment only in low-income countries. So the externalities explain the human capital accumulation unrelated to economic growth in these countries. As former studies indicate, continuing accumulation of human capital is the best path for low-income countries; however the findings indicate that limited social returns on education are estimated during the initial accumulation period due to the mechanism of human capital accumulation caused by the international externality of education.

Rickshaw-pulling is one of the prevalent occupations for poor males in Bangladesh and it has been regarded as an “unsustainable livelihood.” Seeking an alternative to the mainstream understanding, this article attempts to interpret rickshaw-pulling as an important phase of getting out of poverty. The study draws on an observation of landless poor households who participated in a poultry-rearing program implemented by a Bangladesh NGO, Institute of Integrated Rural Development (IIRD). Data were collected in a village in north-western Bangladesh, which I will refer to as “P village”, from October 2003 through April 2004.

The participant households in P village fell into two categories in terms of their main income source before participation in the poultry program. They are those who had an occupation bringing a comparatively regular income throughout a year, such as rickshaw or rickshaw-van owner-driver, sawmill worker and rice mill worker, and those who relied on day labour characterized by fluctuating job availability and irregular income from season to season. The families belonging to the first category overcame food shortages with a regular income and could use the poultry income for other investment purposes from the beginning. In contrast, those with irregular income had to, first of all, use the additional income from poultry for food consumption. Furthermore, while the rearers with a year-round main income source endured fluctuations in poultry income, those with a seasonally fluctuating main income source were more vulnerable to a loss in poultry rearing.

When a new economic opportunity is given, it turns out that occupational change from a day labourer to a rickshaw owner-driver is an advance in livelihood. Microcredit programs of NGOs opened up an opportunity for landless labourers to become a rickshaw owner-driver on credit. It is, however, impossible for a family with only one male income earner to find another regular income source, even with a loan. What is important is to create a second regular income-generating opportunity during the advance achieved through the first opportunity. A good example of necessary intervention is IIRD's poultry program which allows uneducated women to earn a regular income in addition to existing incomes earned by male breadwinners.