Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 297

resulted in a substantial improvement in overall standards of living or stimu-
lated an autonomous dynamic of development beyond the entrance of a
minority of members from amongst the national elites into some positions of
management such as, for example, in Kenya (Sindiga, 1999: 95).
During the initial phases of postwar tourism expansion, a number of
newly independent states deployed a combination of state intervention and
limited foreign investment in order to develop tourism, including in Tunisia,
where in the space of five years (1960-1965), up to 40% of the accommoda-
tion capacity was built with state capital (de Kadt, 1979b: 20). The chief aims
of state-led development, manifested for example in Tunisia which trans-
formed itself into a major Mediterranean beach resort destination by the end
of the 1960s via a state-led project of economic modernisation through tour-
ism commencing in 1959 (Hazbun, 2008), was to harness tourism in order
to modernise their societies and encourage a degree of economic self-reliance
(Curry, 1990). However, despite many of the laudable aims of 'Third World'
models of socialism and centrally planned development which underpinned
many of these attempts to develop a state-run tourism industry, the long-
term developmental consequences of state-run domestic hotel chains were
on the whole plagued by bureaucratic inefficiencies and under-investment.
As the internal contradictions of their economies collided with the 'perfect
storm' of factors associated with the worldwide economic slump of the early
1970s, extensive borrowing linked to large-scale tourism projects soon
became encouraged by different lending agencies affiliated to the World Bank
between 1969 and 1979, which funded a total of 24 'tourism plants' in 18
countries, amounting to a total investment of US$1.5 billion (Badger, 1996: 21).
By 1968, the proportion of the tourism sector controlled by the state in
Tunisia had already passed into predominantly (83%) private hands (Hazbun,
2008: 11).
From the outset, these large-scale tourism development projects contrib-
uted to the accumulating debt burdens amongst many newly independent
states in the 'Third World'. 4 Many cash-strapped countries such as Turkey,
Egypt and The Gambia, amongst others, which had a borrowed substantial
amount of funds in order to develop large-scale tourism infrastructures, found
themselves at the mercy of International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank
structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) by the end of the 1970s (see con-
tributions in Badger et al. , 1996; see Chapter 2). The significance of these
World Bank assisted projects extended beyond the economic sphere into the
ideological baggage that accompanied them. Development was seen as axi-
omatic, and merely depended on the provision of adequate technical exper-
tise and 'a firm belief in economies of scale in relation to infrastructure and
communications' (Burns, 1999a: 333).
In the face of widespread international criticism for its role in exacerbat-
ing the debt crisis and economic impoverishment of LDCs via the imposition
of SAPs, by the early 1990s the World Bank had started to adopt a different