Conclusion
This review has considered the evolution and shifting focus of various theoretical and thematic contributions to the political economy of tourism. From what was once a largely pragmatic enterprise dominated by applied studies of tourism’s economic impact on ‘developing’ countries in which development was calibrated measured according to the metrics of economic growth/GDP, the political economy of tourism has evolved into an increasingly varied terrain of thought shaped by diverse theoretical viewpoints and informed by empirical insights.
Modernization theory provided early intellectual cover to the ideological enterprise of opening up of newly independent states in the ‘Third World’ to overseas tourism and capital investment as a means of promoting economic development. No sooner had a consensus begun to take shape regarding tourism’s capacity to benefit developing countries than it was countered by dependency and underdevelopment theorists which became the catalyst for a series of neo-Marxist-inspired critiques of tourism and its ostensive contribution to economic development. In spite of their well-documented shortcomings, neo-Marxist theories of tourism and dependency/underdevelopment nevertheless served to highlight the manner in which the development of tourism in these nascent ‘Third World’ economies was implicated in the production and reproduction of systemic inequalities between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ states, and to an extent, within advanced capitalist societies themselves.
As identified in the works of Clancy, Hazbun and Steiner studies of tourism development have been marked by the undertheorisation of the state. Indeed, if it was mentioned at all it was assumed that state-led tourism development had more or less failed throughout less developed economies. However, as institutionalist political economy subsequently demonstrated, the developmental state played an integral part in the state-managed integration of developing economies into the world economy through tourism. The particular strength of these analyses was to go beyond mere description of the state’s role in tourism development to elucidate how distinctive state formations and their institutional character have exerted a critical influence on the economic structure and spatial organization of tourism economies and indeed its distributional outcomes.
