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Birds of passage: circular migration and tourism development in Spain, 1955-1973

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Universitat de Barcelona. Facultat d'Economia i Empresa

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[eng] Circular migrations have played an important role in multiple migratory episodes in the past and present. They have also increasingly been a source of interest for political institutions.  Based on the Triple Win theory, governments and other public and private institutions perceive these migrations as a way to alleviate labour shortages, brain drain and fight against illegal migration. However, the differential impact of these migrations in source and host societies is a factor sometimes neglected by the literature, despite being potentially important for our understanding of a variety of key social and economic indicators. 
This thesis analyses circular migrations in Spain during the rural exodus, 1955-1973. To do so it focuses on a key scenario of internal migration during this period, intimately related to this typology of migratory flows: the formation of the tourism labour market in Spain, with particular attention to the main tourist region, the Balearic Islands. The Spanish tourism boom is characterised by an intense process of structural change with crucial socio-economic ramifications in the short and long term, shaping the economic specialisation of the Spanish economy and some of the characteristics of its labour market. The process of labour market formation in this sector was based on intense migrant assimilation shaped by circular migratory flows, which in the mid-XX was a notable and distinctive component of international and internal population mobility in comparison with other European countries. Thus, the study of this historical episode addresses the relationship between the persistence of circular internal migrations in Spain and the development of the tourism industry, labour market inequality, migrants’ location choices and their levels of social mobility during the period. 
The study of circular migrations and tourism employment both in the past and present involves significant methodological obstacles, given the scarcity of sources and methods appropriate for the distinctive features of this phenomenon. To overcome them, one contribution of this thesis is an array of novel micro and macro quantitative and qualitative sources from archival work in combination with methodological and conceptual innovations akin to recent studies such as that of Dustmann and Görlach (2016). The present study integrates both empirical quantitative and qualitative approaches to respond to two sets of guiding questions. Firstly, the process of labour market formation is studied to explore the role and impact of circular migration on the model of industrial relations and levels of labour market inequality in the host regions. Secondly, from this analysis, three main questions arise that are answered in the following chapters: Did circular migration play a significant role in fostering firm expansion? Why did some households from southern Spain decide to migrate to tourist regions and persist in migrating circularly over several years? Did the temporariness of the migration significantly explain the differential levels of social mobility? 
A key result of this work is that the development of tourism in this period implied the formation of a new labour market, where both intra and interregional circular migration became crucial for the level of growth recorded. The short-term impact of this migration was in accordance with most of the assumptions of the Triple Win Model: circular migrants helped the expansion of firms which benefited the social mobility of locals and long-term migrants in the hospitality and tourism-related economy, and circular migrants found in the tourism regions abundant seasonal jobs with lower comparative human capital requirements than other destinations and better wages than in their place of origin. However, this pattern of tourism development also meant a higher level of labour inequality and significant constraints for future economic and socio-ecological adaptation. 
The temporariness was an important factor to understand these results. The author’s interpretation concludes that most circular migratory movements were the result of voluntary and non-voluntary returns. While voluntary returns were shaped by the differential capacity of capital accumulation and investment in the areas of origin and destination, most persisted in circular migration because of housing shortages, lack of migratory networks, seasonal labour demand and an inadequate labour regulatory framework. In this context, the empirical results suggest that circular migrants had lower incentives and capacity to acquire host-specific human and social capital, key drivers of occupational upgrading. As the years of circular migration increased the income differential between these migrants and natives and similar but permanent migrants grew higher. As a result, the tourism development under this model of development and institutional framework produced social and economic inequality in the host societies and difficulties in achieving social cohesion in the mid-term. These results highlight the crucial role of public policies that pay attention to the differential nature of circular migrations, particularly regarding housing and employment policies.

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cc by (c) García-Barrero, José Antonio, 2022

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Tesis Doctorals - Facultat - Economia i Empresa

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Birds of passage: circular migration and tourism development in Spain, 1955-1973