Past Challenges and Emerging Advances of Statistics of Tourism Labour and Employment
Igor Chernyshev¹, Scott M. Meis²
¹Department of Statistics, International Labour Organization, Geneva, Switzerland; ²Evaluation and Research, Canadian Tourism Human Resource Council, Ottawa, ON, Canada

This paper will highlight the latest developments and emerging advances, results and findings from recent lines of research and development at both national and international levels, including new concepts and definitions, emerging international standards as well as new statistical instruments (business surveys) and analytical instruments (i.e., labour accounts, forecasting models) relating to employment in the tourism indistries.

Growing recognition of tourism as an engine of employment generation and a significant growing element of international trade has stimulated widespread interest in tourism related employment, including the effects of the recent global economic crises and the emerging recovery of tourism demand and tourism industry employment, respectively. This has also created renewed interest in improving technical standards, tools and sources of statistical information on tourism employment.

International Organizations such as the International Labour Organization, as well as national organizations, such as the Canadian Tourism Human Resource Council and Statistics Canada, have all pioneered recent advances and statistical reviews towards overcoming longstanding challenges in this statistical domain.

The communication of the findings of these new lines of research and development have implications for a broad range of producers and users of tourism labour statistics and tourism-specific labour market information.

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Keywords: Tourism labour statistics; Tourism statistics; Labour force accounts; International standards for tourism statistics

Biography: Since February 2006, Scott M. Meis has been President of SMMRA, Scott M. Meis Research Associates, an industry and market research firm specializing in statistical analysis of tourism, parks and recreation phenomena. From 1989 to 2005 he was Director of Research for the Canadian Tourism Commission (formerly Tourism Canada). Mr. Meis also serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the International Center of Studies in the Tourism Economy (CISET) at the Universiti Ca Foscari Di Venezia and as Special Advisor, Evaluation and Research for the Canadian Tourism Human Resource Council. In 2006 and 2007 he served as a collaborating consultant to the World Tourism Organization and the Statistics Canada Adivisory Committee on Service Statistics. In June 2007, the Travel and Tourism Research Association recognized his industry contributions through the Lifetime Achievement Award.