Travel Reference
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planning and direction and little statistical information. Lacher and Nepal
(2010: 964) examined the dependent relationship of four tourism-related vil-
lages in the periphery in Northern Thailand and a corresponding urban area,
noting that the peripheral regions in most developing countries have to deal
with 'uneven terms of trade, economic exploitation, and political manipula-
tions from central governments'. Political dependency and tourism have been
explored in the context of the peripheral island of Gozo, where political deci-
sions on their tourism development were made on the main island of Malta
(Chaperon & Bramwell, 2013). Others have also explored the issue of depen-
dency of small islands along with the dangers that are apparent when these
islands rely on tourism for their livelihoods (Boissevain, 1979; Britton, 1987a;
Francisco, 1983; Macnaughten, 1982; Oglethorpe, 1984; PĂ©rez, 1980; Wilkin-
son, 1987). Bertram (1986), however, argues that there are regions, such as
small islands, where 'dependent development' is sustainable and preferable
to the drive for self-reliance and where migrant labour remittances, licensing
fees from foreign fishing vessels and tourism should be pursued.
One of the origins of dependency is the structuralism school, which has
domestic industrialism as one of its main strategies of development. During
the post-war tourism expansion, a number of newly independent states
pursued state-led tourism development, including the creation of domestic
hotel chains to modernise the country and to promote economic self-reliance
(Curry, 1990). In Tunisia, for example, 40% of the accommodation was built
with state funds from 1960-1965 (de Kadt, 1979b). The difficulty with this
approach of building a state-led tourism industry will, however, be pointed
out in the following section on economic neoliberalism. In the end, many of
these countries had to borrow money from international lending agencies for
large-scale tourism projects.
Dependency is also discussed in the tourism literature in terms of cul-
tural dependency, which evolves with mass tourism (Erisman, 1983; Nash,
1989). The demonstration effect, whereby locals adopt the tourists' values
and behaviour, illustrates the role of tourism in cultural change.
Developing countries were seen to be on the receiving end of these
impacts. However, Wall (1995) has suggested that this notion of impacts and
dependency needs to be changed as communities are not only impacted by
tourism but also respond to it. There have been efforts to apply greater levels
of theoretical sophistication to the nature of the impacts of tourism and also
how people such as entrepreneurs respond to opportunities (see Bras, 1997;
Hashimoto & Telfer, 2004).
Economic Neoliberalism
While some theorists called for the creation of a hybrid approach incor-
porating modernisation and dependency-world systems perspectives, others
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