Tourism's Economic Impact on Developing Regions

For many low- and middle-income countries, international tourism ranks among the largest single sources of foreign-exchange earnings and formal-sector employment, a dependence the World Bank and UN Tourism both track closely through tourism's share of export earnings and GDP; the World Bank has repeatedly identified small island developing states, including several in the Caribbean and Pacific, along with a number of Southeast African and Southeast Asian economies, as among the countries where tourism receipts constitute the largest or near-largest component of total export revenue. Tourism's appeal as a development strategy rests partly on its comparatively low capital-entry barrier relative to industrial manufacturing, since a country with attractive natural or cultural assets can, in principle, capture foreign spending without first building extensive industrial infrastructure, a logic that shaped post-independence development planning in countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, and several Caribbean states from the 1960s and 1970s onward.