SARS cost Asia 7m jobs, but is recovering: PATA
SARS cost Asia 7m jobs, but is recovering: PATA
Agence France-Presse, Bangkok
The SARS crisis cost Asian economies over seven million jobs and slashed at least US$30 billion off growth estimates this year but effects on the worst-hit countries should be short-lived, a travel association said on Thursday.
Asia's tourism and travel industry was ravaged by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which prompted a plunge in travel in the region earlier this year, dampening the economies.
"The spin-off effects were horrendous," Peter de Jong, president of the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), said in a speech, citing statistics that China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam will lose almost three million front-line tourism industry jobs.
"And if we factor in the indirect component, that figure more than doubles to seven million jobs lost in those four destinations alone," de Jong told a three-day global tourism conference here.
Indirect job losses brought on by SARS were widespread in service industries and hit everyone from restaurant staff to drinking water suppliers and air conditioner producers, according to PATA, the recognized authority on Pacific Asia travel and tourism.
In May, the World Travel and Tourism Council reported that 25 percent of China's tourism industry earnings would be lost, along with a total of 2.8 million industry jobs, or one-fifth of the country's total industry employment.
Load levels on Hong Kong's Cathay Pacific collapsed from one million per month to just over 200,000 in May, and the company teetered on the edge of bankruptcy before recovering to 90 percent levels in August.
He stressed, however, that Asia's resilient tourism industry was already bouncing back and reaching performance levels similar to last year's.
Updated forecasts for the destinations hit hardest by the SARS pandemonium indicate that the consequences will be relatively short-lived.
"Most flows will have returned to normal by the end of this year," de Jong said. "All in all we expect a return to aggregate annual growth rates of around 4.0 to 6.0 percent during 2004."
He pointed to better-than-expected recoveries under way in Singapore and Hong Kong, where travel had dropped off the charts due to SARS fears.
Singapore's arrivals in May contracted by a stunning 70 percent but the island nation reported that in the last week of August, international arrivals were just 6 percent behind the same period last year.
Its hotel occupancy rates have also surged back to 69 percent, nearly reaching the 2002 average of 70 percent, de Jong said.
In Hong Kong, where May arrivals declined 68 percent, tourist numbers in July climbed back over the million mark for the first time since March to be also just six percent behind the same period in 2002.
PATA stressed that with Asia-Pacific generating almost 60 percent of global tourism demand, governments in the region should do more to protect and expand their countries' tourism industries.
The region has seen astronomical tourism growth, hosting almost 280 million international visitor arrivals in 2002 compared with 152 million in 1990 and 70 million in 1980.