Economic determinants of employment transformation and labor demand in Ukraine’s tourism and hospitality industry

The article investigates the economic determinants of changes in employment and labor demand in Ukraine’s tourism and hospitality industry, accounting for differences between subsectors, business forms, and the constraints imposed by wartime economic conditions. The paper argues that observed employment, employers’ gross hiring requirements, and unfilled vacancies must be analyzed separately. They may move in different directions because of labor mobility, employee turnover, seasonality, productivity growth, and spatial mismatches. The study aims to systematize the determinants of these processes and develop an analytical framework explaining how changes in service demand and labor availability translate into sector-specific employment outcomes. The methodology combines structural analysis, comparisons across consistent statistical populations, percentage-change calculations, descriptive decomposition, and mechanism-based interpretation. The empirical component uses the State Statistics Service of Ukraine data on persons employed by enterprises in NACE-equivalent activity groups 55 (accommodation), 56 (food and beverage service activities), and 79 (travel agency, tour operator and reservation services) for 2020 and 2024. We use official publications, employer survey findings, and reports by international organizations to interpret the institutional and labor-supply context. We distinguish descriptive findings from hypotheses that would require additional microdata and econometric testing. Within the defined enterprise-employment scope, recorded employment in the three activity groups fell from 96,137 persons in 2020 to 64,831 persons in 2024, a 32.6% decline. Food and beverage services accounted for the largest absolute share of this change, while travel-related intermediary services experienced the largest relative decrease. The study proposes a four-part classification of determinants: market-demand, labor-resource and demographic, organizational and technological, and institutional and territorial determinants. It further identifies three distinct outcome channels: the stock of jobs supported by production activity, the flow of replacement hiring, and employers’ ability to fill positions. The research contributes a framework explaining why vacancies may persist while the observed stock of jobs decreases, without interpreting descriptive associations as causal estimates. The findings provide an analytical basis for targeted labor-market measures, skills development programs and improved monitoring of labor shortages in Ukraine’s hospitality and tourism economy.