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as Duffy's (2002, 2006) work on ecotourism all too vividly demonstrates.
The ability of TTCs to dictate the terms and scope of product diversification
and innovation within a wider context of resort restructuring, whilst exter-
nalising risk as far as possible via a system of contractual relations with sup-
pliers, continues to distribute the balance of power in favour of capital rather
than local destination businesses and workers, particularly when exposed to
the kind of brutal economic restructuring currently being witnessed across
key southern European destination economies. Indeed, rather than challenge
the structural logic of market forces and destructive waves of competition
between barely distinguishable destinations, the shift towards ostensibly
sustainable forms of tourism at the beginning of the 1990s through product
diversification, innovation and branding, became a convenient vehicle for the
speculative real estate driven model of tourism whose legacy will be the rav-
aged coastline and precarious livelihoods of Greek and Spanish coastal com-
munities for many years to come.
It is becoming clear that the world is in the midst of a major transition
in terms of the relative balance of power between tourism generating and
receiving nations as the geographies of tourism production, exchange and
consumption shift and change in tandem with the rise of new and emergent
centres of capital accumulation and political power. There is little doubt that
China and other emergent markets will continue their vertiginous rise (see
Jacques, 2012: 2-3), yet one must remain circumspect with regard to the
degree to which this constitutes a definitive shift of the global economy's
'nerve centre' from West to East in terms of the rise of a new global
hegemon. For one thing, China's tourism sector remains overwhelmingly
regulated by the state whilst the majority of outbound tourism is absorbed
by Hong Kong and Macao. What is of perhaps even greater concern will be
the terms on which weaker regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, for whom
tourism continues to offer one of few economic development options, will
continue to be integrated into wider circuits of tourism capital, wherever
these may originate.
While tourism development research has long since transcended crude
cost-benefit analyses of the overall economic contribution of tourism to des-
tinations, there remains an overwhelmingly positivist tendency to frame the
study of tourism development in terms of its overall contribution to LDC
economies in particular. Whilst they remain important considerations, the
central concern for the international political economy of tourism should
not be directed primarily to whether or not national incomes and employ-
ment are rising thanks to tourism, or indeed, whether or not TTCs provide
a decent wage for their workers but, rather, to what extent are the emergent
industrial and geographical configurations of tourism production, exchange
and consumption challenging or reinforcing the prevailing global distribu-
tions of power and inequality. Only then can we begin to claim that the
international political economy of tourism has come of age.
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