Overview

Abstract (English)

This thesis is to investigate the relationship between the productivity in the Canadian tourism and hospitality industries and workforce characteristics, human resources management practice, technology change. The productivity analysis is conducted with different measures of productivity, such as labour productivity and total factor productivity. The first chapter is to calculate labour productivity using the Canadian National Tourism Indicator (NTI) and the Canadian Human Resource Module of Tourism Satellite Account (HRM) for six tourism industries during the period 1997-2008 and to estimate an econometric model of labour productivity. Labour productivity is found to increase with the capital labour ratio, the proportion of part-time hours, the share of immigrant workers and by the proportion of the most experienced workers. The second chapter decomposes the total factor productivity growth for the Canadian tourism/hospitality industries with dynamic factor demand models which is estimated with non-linear Full Information Maximum Likelihood (non-linear fiML) estimator. The results show that only a few Canadian tourism/hospitality industries experienced positive total factor productivity growth and had a major gain from technological change during the period 1983-2003. The final chapter is to examine the impact of technology use (ICT), training and labour turnover on labour productivity in the Canadian tourism/hospitality industries, using cross-section time-series firm-level representative data (Canada Workplace and Employee Survey (WES), 1999-2005). The study found that the labour productivity is positively related to the share of workforce using computer and having computer training both on-the-job and in-classroom.

Abstract (French)

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