International Tourism: An Assessment and Overview

Abstract

Marketers typically hail tourism as an economic panacea. This article provides an assessment of international tourism, with specific emphasis on the Third World. The analysis is based on a variant of world-systems theory in which the relative power imbalance between the developed core countries and less-developed periphery countries of the world brings about the dependence and de facto exploitation of the latter We conclude with a summary of the positive and negative effects of tourism on host cultures and a call for more careful and balanced consideration of these aspects of tourism, in both planning by developing nations and tourism research by marketing academics.