Economic impact of tourism development

Tourism today is one of the fastest growing industries throughout the world. Though the third world shares a small slice of this growth, in a large number of developing countries tourism is an important economic force and its study is of increasing academic and practical interest. A large number of developing countries today are aware of the potential benefit of tourism and most of those having suitable infrastructure are well ahead in the way of exploiting this avenue for economic development. But, owing to readily available data published by the world Tourism Organisation (WTO) and the difficulty in gathering information relating to domestic tourism, most of the research investigations deal with international tourism. This book is an attempt towards an evaluation of the economic impact of different types of tourism (including domestic tourism) in the third world countries in general and India in particular.

The book provides a comprehensive overview of tourism development in the third world. The author illustrates his arguments with a wide range of examples drawn from Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and the Caribbean Islands. The first part of the book sets the analytical scaffolding of the study. The second part focuses on economic aspects of tourism development on the basis of available secondary data on the size of tourist flow, the expenditure per day etc. Part three deals with an attempt that has been made to understand the process of tourism development through some case studies conducted under certain control situations. In the concluding part, an empirical model has been built on the international tourism demand for India.

This book will be a valuable source of information for the students of tourism and those professionally concerned with tourism.