The Effect of Tourism on Employment: A Meta-Analysis and Meta-Regression of 39 Empirical Studies (2002–2023)

This study conducts a meta-analysis to assess the impact of tourism on employment, synthesizing 401 partial correlation coefficients extracted from 39 empirical studies. Employing partial correlation coefficients (PACs) as the effect size measure, the results indicate a modest but statistically significant positive association between tourism and employment, with an average effect size ranging from 0.095 to 0.113. The meta-regression results indicate that the estimated effect varies systematically with the type of tourism indicator, employment definition, use of fixed effects, panel data and macroeconomic controls. Evidence of publication bias and small-study effects is detected, yet robust estimation techniques confirm the presence of a genuine effect. The findings imply that tourism should be considered a complementary and context-dependent instrument for employment policy, with stronger effects associated with tourism intensity measures such as overnight stays and with weaker effects in studies employing more rigorous empirical designs.