Regional Analysis of Tourism Industrie's Employment: A Case Study of Khorasan Razavi ProvinceRegional Analysis of Tourism Industrie's Employment: A Case Study of Khorasan Razavi Province

Tourism is one of the best sources of economic growth and job creation in every region. Khorasan Razavi province, especially Mashhad as the second-largest religious city of the world and the spiritual capital of the Shiite world, has tourism capabilities with very valuable religious and cultural functions. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the employment situation in each of the main province's tourism activities. another goal of the study is to analyze the effect of increasing investment in all and each of the main sectors of tourism on the rate of direct and indirect employment in the Province's tourism industry. For this purpose, the updated input-output table of Khorasan-Razavi province (2018) has been used in the framework of analytical scenarios. The results were analyzed by considering two scenarios (proportional investment in all economic sectors of the tourism industry together, and investment in each economic sector of the tourism industry separately).
The results of the study showed that if investment in all sectors of tourism increases by 100 billion rials simultaneously -equivalent to 800 billion rials in total- (as an analytical scenario), 2831 people will be employed at the province's economic activities. Of this amount, 97.5% of people will be directly employed in the eight sectors of the province's tourism industry. The most important suggestions of this study were, investment in the field of religious and political services, construction and development of ecotourism resorts and non-reduction of the share of investment in the tourism industry due to its role in direct and indirect employment in the province.