Escaping the Resource Curse

According to the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), tourism is ‘number one in the international services trade’, accounting for 40 per cent of global trade in services and 6 per cent of total world trade.1 1. ‘Tourism – The Path Ahead’, UNWTO NEWS Year XX, Issue 3 (2006), http://www.unwto.org/newsroom/magazine/archives/news3_06_e.pdf (accessed 30 May 2007), p. 6. The tourism industry directly provides around 3 per cent of global employment, or 192 million jobs – the equivalent to one in every twelve jobs in the formal sector. The International Labour Organization (ILO) predicts that this share is likely to rise to 251.6 million jobs by 2010, or one in every eleven formal sector jobs.2 2. International Labour Organization, ‘Human Resources Development, Employment and Globalization in the Hotel, Catering and Tourism Sector’, report for discussion at the Tripartite Meeting on the Human Resources Development, Employment and Globalization in the Hotel, Catering and Tourism Sector, Geneva 2001, http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/sector/techmeet/tmhct01/tmhct-r.pdf (accessed 30 May 2007). Tourism also has an indirect impact beyond employment through tourism-related goods and services, air travel and global consumption patterns. The relevance of tourism for global political economy can no longer be ignored by analysts wishing to account for changing global patterns in poverty and inequality. Despite this, with a handful of exceptions, tourism as a significant feature of contemporary global political economy has thus far attracted little attention in the field of international political economy (IPE).3 3. See Stephen Britton, ‘The Political Economy of Tourism in the Third World’, Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1982), pp. 331–358; Michael Clancy, ‘Tourism and Development: Evidence from Mexico’, Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 26, No. 1 (1999), pp. 1–20; William I. Robinson, ‘Globalisation as a Macro-Structural–Historical Framework of Analysis: The Case of Central America’, New Political Economy, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2002), pp. 221–50; Mariama Williams, ‘The Political Economy of Tourism Liberalisation, Gender and the GATS’, International Gender and Trade Network Economic Literacy Series, #4, April 2002, http://www.igtn.org/pdfs/30_TourismGATS.pdf (accessed 30 May 2007). Achieving United Nations (UN) specialised agency status in November 2003, UNWTO is the only international institution existing solely to promote the spread of the tourism industry across the globe.4 4. Address by Francesco Frangialli, Secretary-General of UNWTO, to the fifty-eighth Session of the United Nations General Assembly', New York, 7 November 2003, http://www.unwto.org/newsroom/speeches/2003/disc_sg_ag_nu_7nov03_A4.pdf (accessed 30 May 2007). Its role can be understood in a number of ways: as a campaigning organisation for the tourism industry; as a donor for tourism development projects; and as the primary source of research and statistics on global tourism.

As a result of the macroeconomic developmental benefits to be gained from the tourism industry – including employment and foreign exchange generation – a growing number of countries are generating ‘national tourism development plans’, in which tourism is seen as the foundation of a country's development.5 5. This essay draws on the author's extensive interviews with tourism development policy makers, tourism workers, private-sector representatives and civil servants in Central America. Playing a consultancy role in such strategies, UNWTO needs to be taken seriously not merely as an industry-specific UN agency, but as an organisation with the ability to influence national and international development policy, albeit within the confines of the dominant development paradigm. This essay introduces the UNWTO by analysing the emergence, structure and scope of the organisation. A review of the organisation's activities identifies two key aims that guide the institution: tourism as a tool for poverty reduction and development, and the further liberalisation of the tourism services sector. ‘Tourism development’ as framed by UNWTO is presented as a problematic process, because of the potential conflict between poverty reduction and liberalisation of the tourism industry.