Effects of tourism development on temporality

Spain has the highest percentage of temporary workers in the European Union, and this problem is even more severe in the Tourism sector. In fact, tourism is well-known for being a source of low-skilled jobs, specifically for showing a higher percentage of fixed-term contracts. However, the tourism employment pattern is characterized by remarkable differences between Spanish regions. On the one hand, this could be related with the fact that each characteristic tourism industry provides a different percentage of its output to tourists, as it is shown in the Spanish Tourism Satellite Account. On the other hand, the relevance of tourism is also different for each Spanish region. Given that, the aim of this paper is to analyse what factors can determine the incidence of temporary employment in tourism activities in Spain. We use different measures such as the specialization ratio, tourism density ratio... in order to identify the degree of specialization of each region in tourism. Results show that temporality is not a characteristic of tourism; in fact temporality decreases with specialization in tourism.