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Tourism employment profile and trends - Empirical evidence from Croatia

This paper is focused in particular to the tourism aspect in generating employment. Governments and other institutions need to know the contribution which tourism makes to the economy in terms of income generation, employment, balance of payments and investment in order to define strategies to attract tourists to the country. In this paper special attention is focused to the employment contribution of tourism as a labour-intensive economic activity. Considering broad scope of tourism, most of the scientific researches in their methodology focus primarily on the lodging industry, or more precisely on the hotel and restaurant industry. Such approach is also applied in this paper. According to the WTO statistic database, the international tourism has grown rapidly and steadily during the past 50 years in terms of the number of international tourist arrivals and total receipts generated by international tourist expenditure. It is estimated that these two main figures will continue to grow at steady pace of approximately 4% a year. Croatian tourism is already growing about 4% annually in the past several years. For the end of current decade, the WTO estimates that the total employment in tourism will rise up to 11.3% of global, of which more than half of employees will be recruited in economic activities that provide indirect employment. Tourism is frequently addressed as a low-grade employer providing considerably low salaries in most of its segments. In Croatian case the hospitality industry provides about 15-20% lower salaries than total average salary. According to the empirical and statistical evidences, tourism employment in Croatia is characterized by four key issues, which are of particular interest for academics and policy makers in order to manage vulnerable groups of job seekers. These four key issues are related to employment of women, unskilled workforce, middle age workers and seasonality of employment. The empirical analysis indicates that "hotel and restaurant" industry in Croatia can be considered as a generator of employment. In Croatian case, the WTTC estimates indicate that by year 2013, the number of jobs generated by tourism should grow 3.7% annually, up to 427.400 or 33.9% of total employment. Therefore, it is important to stress the importance of achieving sustainable tourism development. Tourism has to be planned to grow in harmony with the economy to prevent overcrowding and environmental degradation.

employment ; tourism ; seasonality ; Croatia

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