ABSTRACT
Introduction ............................................................................................110 The Sen Poverty Index and the Poverty Obliteration Paradigm ............111 Using the Sen Index to Measure Poverty ...............................................112 An Empirical Approach for Understanding the Development Experience ..................................................................................... 113 Development Reality in Ecuador: Capabilities, Poverty, Tourism, and Economic Growth ...........................................................................115 Economic Growth ................................................................................. 120 Can Tourism Drive Economic Growth in Ecuador? ............................. 122 Can Tourism Reduce Poverty in Ecuador? ........................................... 126 Can Economic Growth Reduce Poverty? ............................................. 130 The Dual Channels of Tourism in Obliterating Poverty ....................... 132 References ............................................................................................. 134 Endnotes ................................................................................................ 135
INTRODUCTION
In the previous chapter, we assessed the relationship between tourism, growth, and poverty. We found that tourism reduces poverty, and now we must narrow the information space to fully grasp tourism’s potential to help the poor. Positing that tourism, as a development tool, helps the poor implies that tourism decreases the number of people below the poverty line. But is this finding specific enough to direct programs to help the poor? In other words, does it tell us how much poverty is really out there? While we now know that tourism increases the income of everybody, our findings also hinted that incomes spawned by tourism may be unevenly distributed and insensitive to the distribution of incomes among the poor. Therefore, poverty measures by the head count rate (H = q/r) may not tell us much in terms of social welfare evaluation. We need a richer space of information to provide greater insights into the universe of poverty.
