Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 304

considerable ecological and social costs, as demonstrated by the experience
of Thailand (Kontogeorgopoulos, 1999). Clearly, then, the geographically
uneven nature of capitalist development and its articulation with regional
and local socio-economic formations calls into question the continued valid-
ity of a neo-colonial dependency model, which envisages an international
tourism economy based on the uneven trade between discrete national
economies. How can models of analysis be proposed ?
Farewell to the neo-colonial model of tourism?
In a recent piece on The Guardian 's Poverty Matters blog, Glennie (2012)
posed the question, 'is dependency theory dead', on the basis that the 'long
predicted convergence between rich and poor countries appears to be occur-
ring' ? He nevertheless contests this commonly held view amongst many
development analysts and aid advocates alike on two grounds. On the one
hand, despite the fact that some countries appear to have broken out of the
'dependency trap', it still provides a useful lens through which to analyse the
recent history of economic development. On the other hand, although there
does in fact appear to be some indication of a narrowing gap between rich
and poor states (largely due to the rapid growth of incomes in China), the
geographies of global economic inequality that have emerged in the era of
neoliberal economic restructuring are far more complex than previous
'North-South' divisions once implied (Pollin, 2005: 130-138).
With regard to its continued relevance for our understanding of the inter-
national relations of trade and development in tourism, according to the neo-
colonial model of tourism the international organisation of production was
conceptualised in predominantly geographical terms in which the organisa-
tion and control of the international tourism industry resided in the northern
metropolitan core countries. Thus, it followed, that the 'less developed' coun-
tries in the south became progressively subordinated to meeting the needs of
foreign tourists in return for meagre economic benefits, principally in the
form of low-wage employment (Turner, 1976a). However, in very few cases
were attempts made to theorise the 'concrete situations of dependency' in
their historical-geographic context (cf. Cardoso & Faletto, 1979). Most critics
tended to accept the essential causal link between high levels of foreign own-
ership and the leakage of economic surpluses back to the metropolitan econ-
omy and the under-development of peripheral tourism destinations. For the
most part the neo-colonial model of the international tourism system pos-
tulated an excessively deterministic relationship between local commercial
interests at the destination level, and the metropolitan-controlled agencies
higher up the supply chain, whereby the former are rendered functional
to the latter by virtue of the disproportionate control exercised by the
metropolitan core economies over the overall direction of capital
accumulation within the international tourism system (Britton, 1982a: 261).