TABLE OF CONTENTS Margaret J. Daniels
Lori Pennington-Gray
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the political-economic construction of tourism. This chapter is divided into six parts. First, an overview of tourism as an industry is offered. Second, tourism is described as an economic development strategy. Third, economic base theory is used to describe tourism as export driven. Fourth, the distributional consequences of economic development are summarized, with specific emphasis on political economic theory as a means of understanding these consequences. Fifth, a case study of no-growth policy is used to illustrate the ties between tourism, politics, and economics. Finally, the intent, justification, and goals of the remaining chapters comprising this section of the text are offered. The guiding principle of this section as a whole is that development is politically and economically charged in a way that often undermines quality tourism outcomes, especially for host destination residents.
Tourism suffers from an industrial identity crisis. As Smith notes (1988), The lack of an adequate industrial definition has regrettable consequences for tourism. One of the most serious consequences is that tourism perennially suffers from a poor reputation in the eyes of policy analysts, government officials, economic analysts, and industry leaders not involved with tourism. Many of these individuals even express doubts as to whether tourism is truly an industry (pp. 181-182).
Smith explains that the difficulty in defining tourism as an industry arises in part due to the fact that there is not a single industrial code for tourism.
