Abstract
Socio-economic sustainability for tourism workers does not play a prominent role in contemporary tourism economic impact studies. Rather, to promote economic growth paradigms, the focus lies on aggregated employment and income effects. To better understand tourism's contribution to decent work and reduced inequalities (Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 10, respectively), our study assesses tourism's socio-economic impact by focussing on meso-level perspectives from major tourism institutions that are complemented with macro-level results gained through an occupation-based Input-Output model. Although income inequalities across tourism occupations remain relatively low, income inequalities over a period of nine years have increased. Tourism employees continue to work in precarious occupations due to limited training and career opportunities. Employers demand skilled vocational professions and provide non-monetary benefits; however, respective salaries remain average. Altogether, tourism contributes to Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 10 only moderately, and regional tourism institutions need to continue their development strategies for greater sustainability.
Highlights
Tourism economic impact studies are regularly conducted to esti mate the industry's contribution to economic growth and development (Comerio & Strozzi, 2019)
For each occu pational area, we estimated tourism's contribution to employment measured as full-time equivalent (FTE), its average income levels and its total income effects
Understanding tourism in relation to the Sus tainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a challenging task (Bianchi & de Man, 2021), and the fulfilment of the SDGs involves complex and lengthy processes that go beyond the ideas and concepts presented in this study
Summary
Tourism economic impact studies are regularly conducted to esti mate the industry's contribution to economic growth and development (Comerio & Strozzi, 2019). The SDGs fail to give adequate attention to tourism despite its global economic and societal significance (Hall, 2019). As another cause for critique, the SDGs are rooted in a growth-oriented paradigm that inhibits the long-term notion of sustainability (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2018; Robinson, Martins, Solnet, & Baum, 2019(UNEP, 2021)). Sustainability practices in tourism have not yet shown sufficient contributions to achieve the SDGs (Boluk, Cavaliere, & Higgins-Desbiolles, 2017, 2019); this is evident for aspects related to workforce and employment conditions, which have generally received little attention in the tourism-related SDG discourse (Baum, 2018; Winchenbach, Hanna, & Miller, 2019). The lack of effort invested into improving employment becomes even more critical when considering Baum's (2015) observa tion that the status of employment-related issues in the tourism in dustries has not significantly improved in recent years
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