ABSTRACT
Introduction ............................................................................................. 82 Tourism Development in Central America ............................................. 82 Uneven Results of Poverty Reduction .................................................... 85 Ecuador: Looking South to Tourism Development ................................ 88 Economies Can Leverage Tourism to Alleviate Poverty ........................ 92 Tourism and the Growth Poverty Elasticity ............................................ 94 The Quality of Tourism Growth .............................................................. 97 References ............................................................................................. 105 Endnotes ................................................................................................ 107
INTRODUCTION
This chapter examines the empirical relationship between tourism growth and poverty reduction. In the previous chapter, we laid down the theoretical foundations of the connection through the poverty obliteration paradigm. We hypothesize that tourism growth has a double barrel effect on poverty: directly and indirectly through economic growth. We also investigate the conditions that may attenuate the power of tourism in poverty alleviation. We illustrate this hypothesis through six cases. Five of the eight countries are from Central America. They are Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. The other case is from Ecuador, located in South America.1
