improvement -- the first such improvement since September last year and only the second since the prolonged slump began in September 1990.

Air arrivals for the four week period ending Sunday totalled 30,875, up 1.7 percent over the same period last year.

It is still a substantial 21.7 percent below 1990 levels, but it represents the first four-week growth since September 1991. And it is only the second time since the serious slump began in September 1990 that four-week figures have gone up.

So far this year, 77,300 visitors have arrived by air -- a 9.4 percent fall from last year. Arrivals last week totalled 9,435, which was 6.2 percent better than the same week in 1991.

In January, February and March, weekly declines in air visitor arrivals of between 20 and 40 percent were recorded on several occasions.

Tourism and Finance Department officials prefer to look at four-week totals, because they smooth out the sharp variations that occur from week to week.

But they stress that even these figures are but a rough guide to the performance of the tourism industry: A better measure is total visiting spending, which depends on average length of stay and average daily expenditure.