Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Tourism and Regional
Development Issues
David J. Telfer
Introduction
Governments and development corporations around the world favour
tourism as an economic tool for regional development. Funds for regional
tourism development are available and sophisticated plans based on place
branding, infrastructure development and collaboration networks are being
created for regions to compete in what Kotler
et al.
(1993) term 'place wars'.
The scale of the destination can vary from an international region to 'a nation,
a sub-national or local area, with marketing and promotional activities being
geared towards the production of a distinctive and competitive place identity'
(Dredge & Jenkins, 2003: 383). For example, Laos was named as the World's
Best Tourist Destination for 2013 by the European Council on Tourism and
Trade, with a potentially significant impact on visitor numbers.
Projects ranging in scale from urban waterfront redevelopment to host-
ing festivals or mega events like the Olympics, or from creating rural culi-
nary and wine routes or achieving Cultural Capital designations, are some of
the many potential ways tourism is being used to generate regional develop-
ment. As outlined in Chapter 3, the promise of increases in employment,
foreign exchange, technology and development capital (Britton, 1982b) is
highly attractive to governments as they attempt to reduce economic inequal-
ities among regions through tourism. In regions where extractive industries,
manufacturing or agricultural sectors go into decline, governments often
turn to tourism to diversify the economy. While the goals of regional devel-
opment may vary, the main concern is to even out or narrow the gap in life
chances, employment opportunities and real income of the citizens regard-
less of which region of the country they come from (Mabogunje, 1980). In
China for example, tourism is seen as a way to foster regional economic
development to ameliorate the inequalities in income distribution between
inland and coastal regions (Jackson, 2006) whilst in Turkey, domestic
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