Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 305

Thus, receiving societies are portrayed as inert objects or 'sub-systems' (Hills
& Lundgren, 1977: 255), unable to resist the hegemonic power of metropoli-
tan tourist capital.
These conceptual weaknesses arguably stem from two related assump-
tions which lie at the heart of the dependency model. First of all, there is an
a priori assumption that under-development is principally the result of the
transfer of economic surpluses from the periphery to the core through a
process of unequal exchange (see Kiely, 1995: 48-53; Larrain, 1989: 115-145).
On the one hand, foreign exchange leakages vary widely and are notoriously
hard to estimate with any degree of accuracy due to the unreliability of
statistical data provided by governments (which tend to play down any
negative indicators), on the other hand, a systematic and generalised chain
of exploitation is taken for granted where leakages occur, rather than exam-
ined in the context of the specific nature of capitalist social relations and
class alliances which condition the different forms of foreign capital penetra-
tion in the periphery. Although leakages in tourism are typically higher in
small island micro-states (50-70% according to the WTO, 1998b: 70) than
in larger island states such as Jamaica (foreign leakages of 37% in 1994) and
continental states such as Kenya (net earnings were equal to 65% of gross
foreign exchange earnings in 1992), where higher levels of local ownership
and schemes to link local agricultural suppliers with hotels may account for
lower import contents (see Dieke, 1995: 79; Pattullo, 1996: 39, 43-46; Sinclair
et al. , 1995: 59), this does not explain why, for example, many of the poorer
states in the Caribbean are those whose tourism trade is weakest. 6
The second principal shortcoming of the neo-colonial model derives from
the fact that it tends to overlook the systematic variations in the local condi-
tions of development within which tourism is inserted and to which it con-
tributes. Although Britton (1991: 455) later emphasised that 'the [tourism]
production system is not exclusively capitalistic', for the most part, these
studies devoted insufficient room for the exploration of alternative tourism
projects, varied strategies of local adaptation and response to metropolitan-
driven tourism development. Related to this, has been the lack of attention
paid to significant internal inequalities and core-periphery relations within
countries, particularly where uneven patterns of development emerge
between dominant islands/continental states and peripheral islands. This
has been addressed by Weaver (1998b) who demonstrates how domestic tour-
ism in two peripheral islands within archipelagic states (Tobago and Barbuda)
exacerbated historical animosities and disparities in the levels of economic
development between the dominant and subordinate islands. Other instances
of intra-regional and internal core-periphery relationships include the histori-
cally important role played by South Africa in the tourist industries of
Lesotho and Swaziland, as a supplier of both capital and tourists (Crush &
Wellings, 1983), the targeting of the French-dominated tourism sector by
Corsican nationalists seeking independence from the French mainland