Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
resorts, including Nusa Dua Resort in Bali (US$14.3 million), Pomun Lake
Reso, Republic of Korea (US$25 million), Puerto Plata Resort, Dominican
Republic (US$25 million), and the South Antalya Tourism Development Pro-
ject, Turkey (US$26 million) (Inskeep & Kallenberg, 1992). While the World
Bank has not had a department dedicated to tourism since 1979, two of the
agencies within the World Bank Group, including the International Finance
Corporation (IFC) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency
(MIGA), have been actively involved in the sector. The IFC's tourism invest-
ments involve (i) early investment in transitional economies opening up the
private sector; (ii) creation of critical hotel infrastructure for business devel-
opment; and (iii) supporting rehabilitation and upgrading of existing and
obsolete hotel infrastructure, targeting countries with few development
prospects but where tourism has the potential of becoming an important
part of the economy and contributing to the dispersal of economic activity
throughout a country (Pryce, 1998). The mandate of MIGA is to promote the
flow of foreign investments into and between developing countries. While
efforts are underway to raise the profile of tourism within the World Bank
Group, most of the projects that are carried out can be classified into one of
the following categories: infrastructure; environmental programmes, where
the focus is frequently on ecotourism; cultural heritage protection; and small
and medium-sized enterprise programmes (Pryce, 1998). Writing in 2007,
Hawkins and Mann indicated that there were 164 World Bank projects
with a value of $3.5 billion linked to tourism in some way. In their analysis
of the World Bank funding guideline, Hawkins and Mann (2007) interest-
ingly indicated there was a shift over time towards an expanded notion of
development by incorporating sustainable development and micro develop-
ment projects discussed later in this chapter.
With an emphasis on competitive exports and an increase in interna-
tional loans for tourism development, there were inevitably links to struc-
tural adjustment lending programmes. As a condition to accepting some
loans, destinations had to take steps to restructure their economy. Dieke
(1995) was one of the first to explicitly examine the relationship between
tourism and structural adjustment programmes. As a result of the severe
economic slump in economic activity from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s,
29 African countries implemented, to some degree, structural adjustment
programmes. These programmes, inspired by the World Bank and IMF, took
the form of: reducing the size of the government workforces, reducing state
monopolies, selling state assets to private companies and liberalising the
economy to allow foreign investment. The last of these options relates
directly to tourism enterprises (Dieke, 1995). Structural adjustment pro-
grammes have reduced the influence of the state system and highlighted the
strategic importance of the private sector in the development of tourism.
Dieke (1995) argues the government has important functions, which are
seen as enabling rather than operational for the tourist sector. Governments
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