Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
(UNCTAD, 2011: 6), have witnessed very little in the way of economic
improvements since their initial inclusion on the list starting in 1971, with
the exception of Botswana, Cape Verde and the Maldives, each of which
have recently 'graduated' from the list. Despite hopes that tourism would
provide a means by which they could overcome the structural obstacles to
development, many of the 'least developed countries' in particular have faced
an uphill struggle in seeking to build viable tourism sectors due to a range of
internal constraints which are also conditioned by the precise manner of
their historical integration into wider economic systems (see Cater, 1987).
In the Caribbean, where a resort-based package tourism industry with a
strong presence of all-inclusives has predominated since the 1960s, despite
the continued growth of international tourist arrivals and earnings from
foreign tourism - which saw a 220% increase between 1990 and 2004 from
US$9.8bn to US$21.6bn (Caribbean Tourism Organisation, 2012), high levels
of debt, unemployment and poverty continue to exist in many of the
Caribbean's popular tourist destinations, such as Jamaica (Dodman, 2009).
Attempts by individual Caribbean states to secure their own autonomous
paths of economic development have been further undermined since the late
20th century by neoliberal policies aimed at opening up publically-owned
infrastructure to private capital, creating new geographies of inequality
across the region (Sheller, 2009).
This has reinforced a model of tourism development based on large hotels
and a 'gated, security guarded, even fortified, private enclave of the all-inclusive
resort' (Sheller, 2009: 196), exacerbating socio-spatial inequalities both within
particular islands and across the region as a whole. There have nevertheless
been notable signs of improvement in countries such as Uganda, Tanzania and
Cambodia which have seen above average rates of growth in tourist arrivals
and receipts in recent years. In Egypt, tourism has resulted in considerable
economic advancement (until the onset of political unrest in February 2011
that, at the time of writing, continues to destabilise the country and its econ-
omy) as a result of structural reforms carried out in the early 1990s. These
reforms enabled the Egyptian authorities to expand the contribution of tour-
ism to GDP and local employment, and in so doing compensate for declining
revenues elsewhere and thus balance their trade deficit (Steiner, 2006).
The blame for many of these economic and social ills clearly cannot be
solely attributed to tourism, if indeed at all in some cases. Nevertheless, it
must be a cause for concern that in those places where tourism has played an
instrumental role in economic development, the evidence suggests that it has
not brought about the desired/expected benefits for large swathes of the pop-
ulation, as predicted in several well-known studies such as the Zinder and
Checchi Reports (see Lea, 1988; Wood, 1979), and promoted by various inter-
national agencies (UN, 1963). Notwithstanding the expansion of tourism into
'new' destinations, such as Cambodia, Mali, Laos and Myanmar, Uganda and
Tanzania (WTO, 1998b: 12), in many cases tourism does not appear to have
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