ABSTRACT

International tourism has been described by Louis Turner as ‘the most promising, complex and under-studied industry impinging on the Third World’. It is only recently, however, that tourism has begun to take its place besides more traditional economic activities in the textbooks on Third World development. When one examines the large and rapidly growing literature on tourism, some interesting trends and divisions emerge. Up to twenty years ago all studies tended to assume that the extension of the industry in the Third World was a good thing, though it was acknowledged that there were a number of associated problems to be overcome in time. This picture changed in the 1970s with academic observers taking a much more negative view of tourism’s consequences to the point of forthright criticism of the industry as an effective contributor towards development.