Direct tourism employment adds another dimension to measuring the role of tourism in the New Zealand economy, focusing on tourism’s impact on employment. Table 11 shows total full-time equivalent (FTE) persons directly employed in tourism.
These are shown in terms of paid employees and working proprietors, and are broken down into full-time and part-time positions. In the absence of hours worked data, a part-time employee is assumed to equate to 0.5 of a FTE employee. A full-time employee is defined as an employee who works 30 or more hours a week, while a part-time employee is one who works fewer than 30 hours a week.
Table 11
Points to note from table 11:
- There were 94,600 FTE persons directly employed in tourism for the year ended March 2009. Direct tourism employment increased 1.6 percent between 2006 and 2009. Total FTE persons employed in New Zealand increased by 4.4 percent over the corresponding period.
- The number of persons employed in tourism does not necessarily correlate with movements in total tourism expenditure or direct value added. In 2009, for example, direct tourism value added decreased by 4.4 percent, while FTE persons directly employed in tourism increased by 0.4 percent. This difference may be the result of a number of factors. There may be a lag between growth in a given industry and the decisions made to employ new staff. Alternatively, there may be a shift in the number of hours worked, or in output per FTE. Furthermore, the convention of defining a part-time employee as equivalent to 0.5 of a FTE may not necessarily be a true representation of the differences in hours worked.
Tourism industry ratios have been used to allocate tourism employment numbers by industry. This treatment assumes that, for each industry, a given dollar value of output will require a fixed quantity of labour input, regardless of whether the products are purchased by tourists or non-tourists.