The rise of a service-based economy and its transformation: seaside tourism and the case of Rimini

Abstract

This article examines the birth and development of Rimini's tourism district. We analyse the origins of the hoteliers in this Italian seaside resort and construct a database on the first wave of registered hoteliers (1929–1939) and on their social, geographic and economic background. We then investigate the transition from services to industry. The following sections analyse the influence of tourism growth and construction demand on the development of related industrial sectors (furniture and wood-work, engineering, brick-making, pottery, clothing). We then examine the crisis of the seaside resort-based economy at the end of the 1970s and the strengthening of the industrial sector in neighbouring towns (the absorption of unemployment in stable industrial jobs). We identify the definite separation of manufacturing from tourism in the 1980s, and the dissociation of the effects of a decline in tourist arrivals from other aspects of industrial performance. In conclusion, two aspects of the development of tourism in Rimini stand out. One is that tourism can provide a distinctive pathway to conventional industrialization. Secondly, this case study demonstrates that both tourism and industry in Rimini were based on small businesses rather than large corporations, and that both sectors now contribute to the city's economic welfare. This distinctive example challenges easy assumptions about the nature of the development of tourist economies and of pathways to industrialization.