THE TOURISM INDUSTRY trumps financial sector in the provision of jobs.
That’s the major finding of new World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) research. The WTTC Benchmarking Report concluded that global tourism supports twice as many jobs as the financial sector and five times as many as the chemicals manufacturing sector.
The research compared travel and tourism to eight other sectors, which are considered to have similar breadth and global presence, across 27 countries and six regions.
WTTC said in 2016, travel and tourism supported 108 million jobs directly, and 292 million in total, taking the direct, indirect, and induced impact into account. The report found that both on a direct and total level, travel and tourism employed more people than the automotive manufacturing, banking, mining, chemicals manufacturing, and financial services sectors.
It also showed that the power of travel and tourism to create jobs “is significantly higher than that of financial services when you compare their contribution to GDP”.
“Travel and tourism generated a total of US$7.6 trillion in GDP in 2016, which makes the sector’s GDP contribution larger than that of banking (US$4.8 trillion), mining (US$5.0 trillion), agriculture (US$5.8 trillion), automotive manufacturing (US$6.1 trillion), and chemicals manufacturing (US$6.5 trillion),” the report stated.
“Global travel and tourism is forecast to grow by four per cent per year over the next decade, which is significantly faster than the global economy at 2.7 per cent and all other sectors covered in the study apart from the financial sector and banking.”
In the Americas, which includes Barbados and other Caribbean countries, US$2.2 trillion in GDP exceeds that of every sector included in the study except for the construction, financial services, and retail.
“The 42.7 million jobs makes the sector larger than banking, chemicals manufacturing, automotive manufacturing and mining in terms of job creation,” the report said. (SC)
