Tourism and Economic Development Issues - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 89

offered considerable opportunities for earning a supplemental income
through either tourism itself or linkages with agriculture and crafts.
In addition, in today's ever more competitive world, some tourism desti-
nations that have achieved economic growth via tourism development, such
as the Canary Islands, encounter the question of how to continue to main-
tain their presence on the international markets with prices that are compat-
ible with growth and income (Parrilla et al. , 2007). Indeed, only the future
will reveal whether or not growth theory, emphasising the importance of
destinations' knowledge, innovativeness and natural capital, can offer the
desired outcome.
As seen from the discussion above, the relationship between tourism and
development depends on both the level of development of a country in gen-
eral and on the level of tourism-related development in particular.
First, in terms of a country's development, a distinction is usually made
between developed and developing countries. The term 'developed country'
is used to describe countries that have achieved a high level according to some
criteria. These criteria relate predominantly to economic development, such
as national income or per capita GDP and the level of industrialisation.
Countries with a high per capita income or with dominant tertiary and qua-
ternary sectors are, thus, considered to be developed. However, recognising a
broader (not only economic) understanding of development, attempts have
also been made to construct a more suitable development measure (Tisdell,
2005). Newer welfare criteria combine economic measures, such as GDP, with
social and political development measures, such as indices for life expectancy,
health, education, politics, efficiency, security, participation and equity
(UNDP, 2011c), opportunities and freedom (World Bank, 1991) or happiness
(Stiglitz et al. , 2010). Nevertheless, as a result of the need for economic indica-
tors in addition to the correlation between economic and socio-political wel-
fare indicators, many similarities exist when determining the status of
developed countries, irrespective of the measurement set used. For example,
the IMF's 2011 economic-based classification of developed (advanced) econo-
mies is built on an economic understanding of development that combines
GDP and industrialisation level and provides a list of 34 advanced countries.
It varies only marginally from the UN's list of high human development
countries based on the Human Development Index that includes indicators
such as life expectancy and education (IMF, 2011b; UNDP, 2011c).
From this perspective, countries higher on the development list have
better general infrastructure, a greater potential to diversify and to increase
tourism spending. That is, they have moved into the third stage of tourism
development. Yet, there is no generally accepted list of countries based on
their stage of tourism as a generally accepted definition of a developed tour-
ism country and the criteria for calculation have still to be created. The
capital coefficient cannot be used as such a criterion for both practical and
theoretical reasons. From a practical perspective, data for all countries are