Using Business Registers to Conduct a Regional Analysis of Enterprise Demography and Employment in the Tourism Industries: Learning from the Irish Experience

Business registers are the foundation upon which all business statistics are compiled. In addition to providing sampling and weighting frames, they are a rich source of information on national and regional economic and industrial structures. The comprehensive coverage of business registers is of particular relevance in the context of tourism, which is a fragmented sector dispersed across a variety of industries. This paper presents a profile of enterprise demography and employment for the tourism industries in Ireland at county level, which corresponds with level 4 of the European Union spatial classification ‘NUTS’. New metrics, entitled ‘Tourism Dependency Ratios’ are derived and mapped. These ratios illustrate how the tourism supply side can be analysed and understood from a spatial perspective. A full-time equivalent (FTE) estimate of employment in the tourism industries is also provided; this is especially important, as it provides a more stable and comparable measure of employment over time.