| > That should really help them out Yeah, it does if you're a tourist. It's been documented [0] for [1] decades [2] how tourism induces a form of Dutch Disease [3]. Tourism dollars are inherently extractive, as that is foreign capital that is not redeployed into capacity building and also leads to premature inflation which prices out less extractive industries. Additonally, most tourist led economies lead to additonal economic stratification, as most countries tourism industries are deeply regulated and tend to be captured by pre-existing economic players (eg. Thailand, Brazil) which only exacerbates social stratification and economic inequality. A great example of this is Thailand versus Malaysia and Vietnam - overtourism in Thailand led to an inflation in low skill services jobs associated with the tourism industry at the expense of manufacturing, which left for fellow ASEAN members Malaysia and Vietnam, both of which limited tourism and strategically targeted foreign capital to manufacturing and high value services (BPO, Software) despite Thailand historically being a peer and significantly more developed than Malaysia and Vietnam respectively. No developing country has made the leap to becoming developed due to a tourism-led industrial policy, and the developed states that did adopt such a policy (eg. Puerto Rico, Portugal, Greece, Italy) only did so after their industrial growth spurts in the 1970s-2000s ended. [0] - https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/lup/publication/1334498 [1] - https://wiiw.ac.at/tourism-and-economic-development-the-beac... [2] - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3648158 [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease |