Myths of tourism institutionalization and Cancún

This interdisciplinary investigation revisits Cancún’s origins and tourism institutionalization. Original accounting documents separate myth and marketing from events to debunk widely disseminated misconceptions of the Mexican state’s role. This rare view of mass tourism emergence at a (trans)formative period demonstrates the historical processes, personalities and ploys. Against a backdrop of conflicts, a banking alliance sparked integrally planned tourism centers. Cancún was the brainchild of economics-trained central bankers inexperienced in tourism with a mandate to increase foreign revenue. Amid looming failure, the bankers swapped land-for-shares to portray the project as a financial success to its stakeholders. Combined with fiscal sociology, organizational theory institutionalization through a six-stage process serves to incrementally reveal the introduction of central planning, the linchpin of Mexico’s tourism predominance.     

Planned Tourism Development in Quintana Roo,Mexico: Engine for Regional Development or Prescription for Inequitable Growth?

In the 1960s the isolated tropical forest enclave of Quintana Roo was targeted by the Mexican Government to serve as the cornerstone for launching what is now considered to be one of Mexico’s most successful economic development strategies – Planned Tourism Development (PTD). This paper commences with a brief review of the role of state-driven PTD in Mexico’s national economic development agenda. Government discourse surrounding the Cancun project emphasised tourism as a mechanism for promoting ‘regional development’through creation of backward linkages to other economic sectors – notably agriculture and small industry – to benefit the region’s marginalised Mayan peasant population. Based on research in Quintana Roo, this paper contends that while PTD has generated profit for the Government, transnational corporations and entrepreneurial elites, it has failed to achieve backward linkages that may have improved conditions for the region’s impoverished rural population. Employing a case study approach, the paper illustrates the failure of PTD to stimulate balanced regional development, while analysing PTD’s role in reinforcing existing relations of domination and subordination to produce new patterns of uneven development and inequity within Quintana Roo.     

Integrating venturesomeness and consumption needs: effects on destination choice along the TALC

This research studies destination choice based on Plog’s venturesomeness concept, incorporating the effects of four consumption needs from the theory of market choice behavior. An empirical test in the context of destinations in two stages of Butler’s tourism area life cycle (TALC) showed that venturesomeness does not predict behavioral intentions as postulated by Plog. However, results demonstrated that epistemic and emotional (functional and social) needs are predictors of preference for novel (mature) destinations, supporting the original conceptualization of Plog’s psychographic framework. The findings shed light on a long-time debated model in the tourism literature.     

Climate Negotiations,EITE Industries,and the WTO: Facing the Conflicts

Though developed countries have contributed the lion's share of greenhouse gases to date, developing countries are rapidly catching up – and seem unlikely to adopt meaningful GHG controls in the near term. This prospect concerns major developed countries, since their own GHG controls could cause carbon-intensive production to migrate to unregulated countries, a phenomenon called “carbon leakage.” This article surveys progress in international negotiations to date. It argues that, given the slow pace of efforts to create a global GHG control framework, carbon tariffs and other border measures are likely to be invoked as an alternative means of preventing carbon leakage. The article illustrates the legal and economic pitfalls of border adjustments and urges major emitting countries to suspend the imposition of border measures for a limited time while negotiating a “Code of Good Practice” to guide their trade-related climate measures going forward. The Code that we describe would constrain the scope of border measures and sharply limit their negative consequences.