Towards a New Political Economy of Global Tourism Revisited - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 327

with the logic of market forces without undermining the leading position of
the more prosperous regions (Perrons, 1999: 189). 18 In addition, it is estimated
that fiscal transfers through the disbursement of structural funds in the
1990s contributed to a 4% rise in Spain's GDP and as much as 10% rise for
Greece and Portugal (Commission of the European Communities, 1999: 12),
figures that do little to highlight the skewed internal socio-economic distri-
bution of wealth and persistence of significant pockets of poverty.
Thus, while regional specialisation has to a certain extent benefited net-
works of dynamic regional economies and major metropolitan centres in
which different layers of capital investment, high status jobs and political
control functions intersect, this has been at the expense of those regions and
cities which are disconnected from 'processes of accumulation and consump-
tion that characterise the informational/global economy' (Castells, 1996:
102-103). On the other hand, the integration of the former East European
states stimulated the take-off of mass tourism in major urban centres such
as Prague and Budapest (with the associated problems of urban congestion
and pollution) and, at the same time, also intensified regional territorial
imbalances in economic development (Hall, 2004). However, behind the
seemingly glowing facade of two decades of unprecedented expansion in the
scale and diversity of tourism development in tourism dependent regions
across the Mediterranean, arguably the most successful tourism destination(s)
in the world in terms of the sheer scale of its industries, lies a legacy of
uncontrolled debt-financed construction and a progressive loss of competi-
tiveness that seemingly can only be counteracted by more of the same.
Conclusion
Notwithstanding the remarkable expansion and diversification of tour-
ism worldwide over the past two decades, and the entrance of China into
the fray, the overall hierarchy between winners and losers in tourism devel-
opment has remained relatively unchanged. Together, Europe and North
America continue to absorb nearly two-thirds of international arrivals and
over half of global receipts from tourism. However, their combined market
dominance has been in progressive decline as emergent destinations absorb
tourism faster than the overall pace of aggregate growth. Elsewhere, even in
successful emerging destinations such as Mexico, which rapidly rose to
become one of the world's leading destinations in the 1990s, growth in
market share was combined with plummeting receipts as result of a collapse
in the value of its currency in 1994 and the imposition of IMF structural
adjustment policies (Gladstone, 2005: 63).
In this chapter, it has been argued that over the past two to three decades
capitalist restructuring and economic globalisation have precipitated a recon-
figuration of power relations that challenges the validity of state-centric