Tourism and the third world

Abstract

Socrates had the inconvenient habit of insisting on defining the meaning of words before starting a dialogue. Of course his dissertations were about philosophic concepts like the good and the beautiful which defy precise definitions. The phrase Third World is not a philosophic concept but over the last decade it seems to have assumed many connotations. For purposes of this article I would like to equate it with the broad concept of developing countries because it conforms to the pattern of international tourist movements. For instance, during the last five years, 1974-8, Europe received 72-5 per cent of world tourist traffic; the US, Canada and Mexico nearly 13 5 per cent; the developing countries of Asia, Africa and the Middle East together only about 8&5 per cent; and Australasia, South Pacific and Latin America minus Mexico accounted for the rest. The following Tables 1 and 2 showing tourist arrivals regionwise amply illustrate the pattern of tourist movements. It needs to be explained that in these tables, Americas means North, Central and South America including the West Indies; South Asia comprises Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka; and East Asia and the Pacific includes Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands besides the ASEAN group and Japan, Hongkong, Korea, Taiwan, Macao, but not China. In order to analyse the character of world tourism one should break down the arrival figures in four segments: a) long-haul or intercontinental movements, between Europe and Asia, North America and the Pacific, or traffic over the North Atlantic; b) short-haul traffic which may be defined as inter-regional or intra-regional, between South Asia and the ASEAN or East Asia or within each regional group like Africa, Latin America, Western Europe and Eastern Europe; c) movements across the borders, as between Belgium and France, Germany and Austria; d) domestic tourism within national borders. It is necessary to make this distinction because in the case of the first three categories the UN World Tourism Organisation (WTO) definition of the tourist is the same. He is a temporary visitor who visits a country other than the one in which he normally resides for a stay of 24 hours or overnight for any purpose other than following an occupation remunerated from within the country visited. Thus a man who travels a thousand miles in Europe and crosses