ECLAC -- 30 July 2009 -- The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) agreed to deepen their cooperation to strengthen statistics systems, tourism satellite accounts and tourism economic indicators in the region.

ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena and UNWTO Secretary General Taleb Rifai signed an agreement in Madrid, Spain, involving a series of joint activities and their financing for a two year period.

This Complementary Note 2 to the Cooperation Agreement signed by both institutions in 2003 and renewed in 2005 hopes to continue the fruitful cooperation between ECLAC and the UNWTO. The Complementary Note 1 was signed in September 2007.

Bárcena and Rifai also agreed to carry out a series of actions to highlight the contribution of the tourism sector to overall economic activity, in the context of the current global financial and economic crisis. These activities hope to reach complementarity in the exchange of information and the analytic work of both organizations in advancing towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and include the presentation of documents in Ibero American meetings.

Some of the work prepared by the UNWTO will be linked to the ECLAC webpage on the economic crisis (www.cepal.org/especialcrisis).

Among the main activities ECLAC has carried out with the UNWTO is the organization of annual Ibero American meetings on the measurement and analysis of tourism, which have examined progress in the area of statistics and tourism satellite accounts in Latin America.