These days an increasing number of developing countries are improving their tourism industries. Why do you think this is the case? Is this a positive or a negative development?
For most developing countries tourism is a major way of earning foreign reserves. And it can be seen that recently most developing countries put more effort on developing its tourism sector. However it is believed that this has positive as well as negative effects which can be broadly discussed in terms of social, cultural and economical perspectives.
Developing tourism industry derives lot of advantages to developing countries. Firstly it brings lot of foreign exchange to countries. And it will be a good method to lower the financial deficit. Also tourism can be used to promote traditional business to the international trade community. On the other hand, governments invest lot of money on infrastructure development to support tourism.
However improving tourism industry has several negative effects. Most of time we have seen that lot of natural places are destroyed with implication of tourism development. And there are lots of incidents where tourists are prosecuted for illegal activities such as child abuse, animal trafficking and smuggling. It is believed that most developing countries have rich cultural habitats, especially Asian countries. Unfortunately it can be seen that with the tourism industry development these cultural aspects are shading from the society.
Finally we can conclude that disadvantages of improving tourism cannot out weight the advantages. And it is authority’s responsibility to make sure they are following well planed long term approaches other than ad-hoc development activities.