Employment Recovery Without Workforce Upgrading Post Pandemic Restructuring in Greek Tourism Enterprises

This article examines whether employment recovery in Greek tourism was accompanied by changes in formal training provision and staffing practices. It uses 1200 establishment observations from the 2018 and 2023 World Bank Enterprise Surveys, including 192 accommodation and food-service establishments. Survey-weighted interaction models compare tourism with other covered sectors, controlling for sampling size, region, establishment age, ownership, exporting, and management characteristics. Permanent-employment growth is estimated by weighted least squares, formal training by binary logit, and workforce shares by fractional logit, with inference clustered by linked establishment. The adjusted differential change in permanent-employment growth is 0.234 on the symmetric-growth scale, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.056–0.413. In 2023, tourism’s adjusted temporary-employment intensity exceeds that of other covered sectors by 18.90 percentage points. The adjusted within-tourism change in formal training is −1.87 percentage points, with a wide confidence interval of −18.05 to 14.31. Annual labour-cost intensity increases within tourism, but its differential change is imprecisely estimated. The findings identify stronger employment growth alongside no statistically detectable increase in formal training provision. They do not establish the absence of broader workforce upgrading or identify a causal pandemic effect. The study highlights the importance of assessing employment recovery alongside training and seasonal staffing practices.