Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 307

goods and services (ILO, 2011). According to the World Travel and Tourism
Council (WTTC), tourism's direct contribution to world GDP amounted to
US$2 trillion or 2.8% of world GDP (WTTC, 2012), whilst figures cited by
the UNWTO for 2012 showed that international receipts from tourism
exceeded US$1 trillion for the first time, confirming its positioning as one of
the world's leading economic sectors, notwithstanding ongoing disagree-
ments regarding its precise industrial classification (Leiper, 2008). With
regard to LDCs or 'emergent economies' in particular, over 50% of the total
inward stock of FDI is absorbed by services of which tourism and related
sectors comprise a substantial part (UNCTAD, 2002, cited in Jacob &
Groizard, 2007). There has also been a parallel transformation in the geom-
etries of global travel as the centres of wealth and power in the global econ-
omy are reconfigured, ebbing away from the advanced industrialised states
towards the emergent nations of the G20. For the most part this is being
driven by the continued rise of China, which has moved up to third and
fourth place in the world rankings of international tourist arrivals and
receipts respectively, up from fifth in 2002 (UNWTO, 2011e).
At a theoretical level, there are a number of contrasting interpretations
regarding the meaning and scope of globalisation as well as the degree to
which powers of the state have receded in the face of global capitalist restruc-
turing (see Hirst & Thompson, 1996; Kiely, 1998; Robertson & Khondker,
1998). It would be hard to deny, however, that a combination of market lib-
eralisation, financial deregulation and technological change have precipitated
a dramatic shift towards ever greater economic globalisation and the recon-
figuration of power relations within the international political economy.
Although manifest in a geographically uneven manner, the process of capi-
talist economic globalisation principally refers to the emergence of highly
integrated cross-border networks of production and finance at many differ-
ent levels in the global economy.
Although ostensibly conditioned by the rigidities of the Fordist mass
production model which became increasingly apparent in the late-1960s,
particularly in the form of economic stagnation and declining corporate prof-
itability, the shift towards new transnational geographies of production and
flows of investment is not reducible to the intrinsic logic of capital accumula-
tion. The processes of economic restructuring and securing of a neoliberal
capitalist hegemony constitute a political project in which a coalition of neo-
liberal corporate, financial and political interests have sought to reorganise
the ownership of productive assets, and thereby shift power away from
labour towards capital (Henwood, 1998: 14-15). While international tourism
activities have been affected by the process of economic globalisation in
much the same way as other economic activities, there are significant quali-
tative differences in the social and geographical organisation of production
within and between different branches of the global tourism industry. Much
has already been said in this respect by Britton (1991), Clancy (1998, 2011),