Issue 7 - Should tourism be promoted in developing countries?

Private Sector & Development

Issue 7 - Should tourism be promoted in developing countries?

Editorial

By Luc Rigouzzo, Proparco's Chief Executive Officer

For over half a century now, tourism has been constantly expanding and at an even faster pace than international trade. This trend would today appear to be irreversible; the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) forecasts there will be over a billion international tourist arrivals worldwide in 2010 and 1.6 billion in 2020. Although developing countries still only hold a marginal position in international tourist flows, their performances are improving at a faster rate than the global average. For these countries – where economic activity is often based on a handful of sectors of activity -, tourism provides real potential for diversification. It provides valuable foreign currency exchange and government revenues through taxation and can be a major source of employment as well as a vehicle of economic and social progress.

 
And yet despite this statistical observation, the links between tourism and development are still subject to debate. Tourism businesses are said to contribute little to local economies and to have negative impacts as they can cause social environmental and even cultural degradation. Moreover, both governments and donors give it extremely varying levels of importance. This is particularly due to the perception of a high level of risk. Tourism has only really been on the development agenda since the 1990s – thanks to organizations such as UNWTO or the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development – but many still fail to make the link between tourism, growth and poverty reduction. However, growth in the sector and the weight it carries in the economies of developing countries – particularly those of least developed countries – compel us to reconsider this activity in all its complexity and take into account both the risks it carries and the opportunities it provides. This issue of Private Sector and Development takes a look at what interest there is in supporting the tourism sector – and investigates the best ways to support it.
 
In order to understand how tourism affects growth and poverty, it is necessary to take its many facets into account. One can question, for instance, the motives and impact of “mainstream tourism” luxury or “all inclusive” tourism operations, whatever their size. It is also worth trying to understand in what way this sector may be more risky and complex than other sectors, requiring specially designed terms of financing. The articles in this issue of Private Sector and Development provide the reader with this multi-faceted approach. We would like to thank all the contributors for having accepted to take part in this exercise, which is difficult due to the complex nature of the sector being analyzed and the way that ongoing debates are evolving. They have succeeded in sharing their different views on a booming sector – this is not the least of their contributions.
 
As with the previous issues of this magazine, which is based on a “three-voice approach” (private sector, researchers and donors), this issue seeks to contribute to the debate – with no a priori – and, at the same time, propose areas for action involving all the different stakeholders. It is certainly too soon to draw any final conclusions – as it is still early days, there are not sufficient ex post evaluations and no methodology has been validated. But the keys to understanding provided by the contributors will, I hope, serve to advance the debate and give the sector – which is often subject to skepticism, when it does not suffer from a bad image – the place it deserves. Our objective is to investigate how the private sector – and tourism as a key example – can contibute to the Millenium Development Goal targets. I hope you have as much pleasure reading these articles as we have had in putting them together, and we have every day in attempting to strengthen the role the private sector plays in development and poverty reduction.
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