Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 321

conditions, securing the involvement of foreign and transnational capital in
the national economy may be one of the few ways a cash-strapped host
government can obtain valuable technical, managerial and financial
resources, notwithstanding the deleterious effects on smaller-scale local
enterprise (see Farver, 1984: 261).
Despite the recent proliferation of tourism in places such as Zanzibar, the
benefits which accrue from tourism are still monopolised by a select few
countries, and capital cities within them (Harrison, 2000b: 47). The struc-
tural obstacles to development faced by many weaker economies are com-
pounded by the lack of an integrated domestic or regional tourist market (few
amongst the tourism workforce in developing states are themselves tour-
ists), 13 thus reinforcing what development economists often refer to as the
'low equilibrium trap' (Hazbun, 2000: 195-196). This places an enormous
burden on the scarce resources of poorer states which, in order to generate a
sufficient level of tourism demand that would sustain the cost of developing
a tourism-related infrastructure, have little choice other than to impose
externally-oriented growth policies. Moreover, those countries that are too
poor even to provide basic infrastructure for tourism may become 'structur-
ally irrelevant' to mobile tourist capital, as demonstrated by the historically
low levels of tourist visitation to countries in sub-Saharan Africa which are
considered 'unbankable' and unsafe for tourists, thus further entrenching the
dominance of the more powerful regional centres of accumulation. This
brings us to the final question to be considered in this chapter: to what
extent is a truly global tourism economy emerging, in which capital and
decision-making powers are monopolised by a few TTCs ? Or rather, as some
of the evidence suggests, are regional imbalances in the nature and scope of
a globalising tourism dynamic becoming more entrenched in the context of
further market liberalisation ?
The global and regional alignments of tourism development
Despite the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberalising policies
continue to exert a stranglehold, albeit to a greater or lesser extent, on gov-
ernments across different states worldwide. Nevertheless, both the global
reach of capital and the degree to which local, household economies have
become integrated into wider circuits of production and exchange, are still
differentiated by geographical variances in economic systems and political
ideologies. Equally, whilst there is evidence to suggest a divergence of inter-
ests between transnationals and the countries in which they are based claims
for the existence of a coherent 'transnational capitalist class' (Sklair, 1991),
in which the nationality of the shareholders and corporate executives who
control the 'commanding heights' of the global tourism industry is of less
importance than their corporate affiliations, must be treated with a degree
of caution.