Using business registers to conduct a regional analysis of enterprise demography and employment in the tourism industries: learning from the Irish experience

MacFeely, Stephen; Delaney, Jillian; O'Donoghue, Fiachra

Using business registers to conduct a regional analysis of enterprise demography and employment in the tourism industries: learning from the Irish experience

Files

Using Business Registers to conduct a regional analysis of Enterprise.pdf(642.02 KB)

Accepted version

Date

2013-12-01

Authors

MacFeely, Stephen

Delaney, Jillian

O'Donoghue, Fiachra

Publisher

Sage Publications

Abstract

Business registers are the foundation upon which all business statistics are compiled. In addition to providing sampling and weighting frames, they are a rich source of information on national and regional economic and industrial structures. The comprehensive coverage of business registers is of particular relevance in the context of tourism, which is a fragmented sector dispersed across a variety of industries. This paper presents a profile of enterprise demography and employment for the tourism industries in Ireland at county level, which corresponds with level 4 of the European Union spatial classification ‘NUTS’. New metrics, entitled ‘Tourism Dependency Ratios’ are derived and mapped. These ratios illustrate how the tourism supply side can be analysed and understood from a spatial perspective. A full-time equivalent (FTE) estimate of employment in the tourism industries is also provided; this is especially important, as it provides a more stable and comparable measure of employment over time.

Keywords

Tourism enterprises , Tourism industries , Tourism employment , Business registers , Regional analysis , Ireland

Citation

MacFeely, S., Delaney, J. and O'Donoghue, F. (2013) 'Using Business Registers to Conduct a Regional Analysis of Enterprise Demography and Employment in the Tourism Industries: Learning from the Irish Experience', Tourism Economics, 19(6), pp. 1293-1316. doi: 10.5367/te.2013.0242