Travel Reference
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and the reconfiguration of a failing coastal mass tourism model since the
early 1990s has precipitated the territorial redistribution of tourist activity
and capital into areas hitherto beyond wider circuits of tourism production
and exchange, leading to the expansion of new tourist activities in smaller
urban centres and lesser islands, as well as the rural hinterlands (Marchena
Gómez, 1995). In Spain, the autonomous communities, led by the Balearic
Islands, Catalunya and the Valencian Region, and subsequently the Canary
Islands, began to devise their own strategic direction with regard to tourism
in conjunction with territorial development plans which in theory were to
take into account regional differences in culture, territory and economic
needs (Pearce, 1997). While there is no denying the unprecedented growth
in tourist arrivals and receipts in these regional centres over the past two
decades, and a degree of success in terms of promoting less environmentally
destructive forms of tourism (see Hughes, 1994), the unfolding Eurozone
crisis has brought the underlying structural weaknesses and distortions of
the southern European growth model starkly into the light, highlighting the
rift between the productive/competitive core and the south, much of which
relies heavily upon tourism and agricultural exports.
When joining the Euro in 1999 and 2001 respectively, Spain and Greece,
two Mediterranean countries with major tourism industries, suddenly found
that they had access to cheap credit in addition to the substantial structural
funds which had been previously disbursed by the EU in order to stimulate
improved productivity, competitiveness and the convergence of their econo-
mies. In Spain in particular, an unholy alliance emerged between regional
governments, developers and the banking sector, fuelling a construction
frenzy and the rapid spread of tourism resorts and establishments along
every available valley and coastline, notwithstanding the putative planning
restrictions that had been put in place during the late 1990s as well as wide-
spread environmental protests (Bianchi, 2004; López & Rodríguez, 2011: 17).
The political consensus within national governments, the EU as a whole
and of course throughout the various international financial institutions and
corporate lobbying organisations such as the WTTC, is nevertheless that
further market integration and neoliberal policies designed to stimulate
growth and competitiveness will continue to engender economic growth and
spread employment creation to where it is needed. However, if anything,
what the Eurozone crisis has brutally demonstrated is that the benefits of
market integration and economic liberalisation are more likely to accrue to
technologically advanced countries and regions endowed with a well-
educated and diversified workforce, sufficient domestic capital, superior pro-
ductivity as well as locational advantages (see Dunford, 1994; Hudson, 2003).
Despite attempts to reduce spatial variations in the levels of economic devel-
opment through the redistribution of structural funds, deepening (and wid-
ening) market integration in the EU has forced the weaker less productive
economies of the South and, more recently, the East, to align themselves
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