Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Background to tourism supply chains
and poverty alleviation
What is known about the scale of income to the poor
from supply chains?
Poor people earn incomes from direct participation in tourism as hotel workers,
guides, craft sellers or transport operators. But they also earn indirectly through
the supply chain - by selling the goods and services that the tourism sector needs.
Key supply chain sectors are food, beverage, construction, furnishings and a
range of services such as gardening, floristry and laundry. Poor people may
operate as micro entrepreneurs, selling direct to hotels, restaurants and operators,
or they may have unskilled jobs in larger companies in those supply sectors.
A recent overview of emerging international evidence suggest that - in some
destinations - the poor may be earning as much from the tourism supply chain as
from direct participation in tourism business (Mitchell and Ashley, 2007). What is
more, there may also be scope to increase incomes of the poor (or 'pro-poor
income') from supply chains. Clearly then, these indirect pro-poor flows are
important to assess, and, where possible, to boost.
However, the data are partial, and understanding of good practice interven-
tions on supply chains is weak. On one hand, there is a vast economics literature
assessing the indirect economic impacts of tourism due to inter-sectoral linkages
('inter-sectoral linkages' are virtually synonymous with supply chains). However,
this literature, while confirming the size of supply chains, does not focus on the
distribution of income or relevance to the poor. On the other hand, there is a
range of pro-poor tourism research and action. 1 However, researchers have
typically paid more attention to assessing direct participation of the poor in
accommodation, craft and cultural services, rather than supply chains.
Practitioners and companies have focused more on stimulating micro and
community businesses in the tourism sector, or on broad community develop-
ment, rather than on small suppliers. An important exception is the small but
growing focus on the food supply chain to tourism.
We consider first what the economics literature tells us about the scale of
tourism supply chains. A range of economic analyses suggest that in many devel-
oping countries, each unit of economic activity in the tourism sector generates
about 0.6-1.2 units of activity in other sectors which supply tourism. Such
research uses input-output models, sometimes as part of Social Accounting
Matrices, Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Models or cross-country
regression analysis, and comes from a range of countries: Tanzania (Kweka et al,
2003), Hong Kong (Lin and Sung, 1984), Seychelles (Archer and Fletcher,
1996), Singapore (Heng and Low, 1990), Kenya (Summary, 1987), China (Fan
and Oosterhaven, 2003), and Egypt (Tohamy et al, 2000).
Generalizing from the detail, these studies suggest that tourism's indirect
contribution to the economy through non-tourism sectors can be equivalent to
around 60-120 per cent of direct effects, thus roughly or nearly doubling the first
Search WWH ::




Custom Search