A gender approach to the impact of COVID-19 on tourism employment

Abstract

This paper analyses how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced employment in the Spanish tourism sector from a gender perspective and aims to infer its impact on sustainability. We use employment data from 2002 (Q1) to 2020 (Q4) on women and men in the Spanish hospitality sector and employ fractional integration methods to determine the temporary scope of the shock. Our results suggest that the impact of the pandemic will have a permanent effect, unless strong policy measures are adopted to resume pre-crisis trends. We also found that persistence is higher for women’s than for men’s employment. Therefore, women seem to be more vulnerable to the shocks of COVID-19, making sustainable development of tourism in Spain more difficult. Based on our results, we offer policy recommendations to counter the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender equality and tourism sustainability.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• tourism
• gender
• Spain
• persistence

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C12
• C13
• Z30

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE) https://www.ine.es/

Notes

1 Performing standard unit root tests, the results support the evidence of nonstationarity in all cases. They are available from the authors upon request.

Additional information

Funding

Gloria Claudio-Quiroga, Águeda Gil-López and Frank Babinger thank Crue Universidades Españolas, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and Banco Santander for funding this research, which belongs to the project IMPETUEMFE, through the Fund “Supera COVID 19.” Luis A. Gil-Alana acknowledges financial support from the MINEIC-AEI-FEDER ECO2017-85503-R project from ‘Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad’ (MINEIC), `Agencia Estatal de Investigación' (AEI) Spain and `Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional' (FEDER).

Notes on contributors

Gloria Claudio-Quiroga

Gloria Claudio-Quiroga is an Associate Professor of International and Spanish Economy at Universidad Francisco de Vitoria (Madrid, Spain) and an external Researcher at the Center for Spanish Studies of Yiwu Industrial & Commercial College (China). She completed her Ph.D. from Complutense University of Madrid in 1994, in the area of International Economy. She has published several chapters and articles in high ranked journals about theoretical and applied econometrics, macroeconomics and international relations.

Luis A. Gil-Alana

Luis A. Gil-Alana is a Faculty Fellow of the Navarra Center for International Development and Professor of Econometrics and Quantitative Methods in the School of Economics and Business Administration at the University of Navarra, in Pamplona, Spain. He completed his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics, LSE, in 1997, in the area of Econometrics and Quantitative Methods. He obtained the Ely Devons prize in Econometrics at the LSE in 1993 and have received many other prizes all over the world. He has published extensively in theoretical and applied econometrics and also in macroeconomics, finance and many other disciplines including climatology, tourism, economic development and energy and environmental issues.

Águeda Gil-López

Águeda Gil-López is an Assistant Professor of Economic History at Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), where she obtained her PhD degree in Economics with an European mention. In 2018 she was awarded with the Complutense Extraordinary PhD Prize of Economics. Her research interests include business history, entrepreneurship and family business. She currently belongs to the research team of a competitive project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education.

Frank Babinger

Frank Babinger is an Assistant Professor at Complutense University of Madrid. He completed his Ph.D from the same University in 2010 in the area of Tourism and obtained the Extraordinary Degree Award. He has also been the Dean's Delegate for Entrepreneurship, External Internships and Employability in the Faculty of Tourism, and the Advisor to the Vice-Rector's Office for Employability and Entrepreneurship. His research interests include tourism and geography.