Impacts of Tourism

Tourism is a study of man (sic) away from his usual habitat, of the industry which responds to his needs and the impacts that both he and the industry have for the host socio-cultural, economic and physical environments. (Jafari , 1981)

Tourism takes place in the environment, which is made up of both human and natural futures. The human environment comprises economic, social and cultural factors and processes. The natural environment is made up of plants and animals in their habitat. However it is important to know that, in a real setting, the human environment and natural environment are interwoven and human activity is both affected by and has effects on the natural environment. Tourism, as a significant form of human activity, can have major impacts. These impacts are very visible in the destination region where tourists interact with the local environment, economy, culture and society.

The impacts of tourism can be positive or beneficial, but also negative or detrimental. Positive economic benefits usually include contribution to the local economy and job creation. Negative economic effects may include increases in the price of land, house and even food prices in tourist destinations, which become particularly evident during the tourist season. Positive social impacts of tourism can include the revival of traditional art or hand craft activity as a result of tourist demand. Negative socio-cultural impacts may include the loss of cultural identity, particularly when tourists are from the developed world and the host allocated in a developing country. This occurs when inhabitants of a developing country imitate the activities of the visitors, who are from developed countries. This may start off as what may be considered relatively innocuous behaviour, such as the desire to wear brand name jeans and consume branded fast food and drink, but can take the form of far more undesirable activities such as drug taking and prostitution. Positive environmental effects of tourism may include revenue generated from visits to sites of natural attractions being used to restore and maintain the attraction, as well as enhanced interest from visitors in the importance of the natural environment and therefore greater willingness to support measurers to protect the environment. Negative environmental consequences include pollution from vehicles, litter dropped by visitors, disturbance to habitats and damage to landscape features.

The Economic Impacts of Tourism

Tourism is often welcomed as industry bringing desperately needed foreign exchange, employment and a modern way of life. To others, tourism raises the spectre of the erosion of traditional lifestyle, inflation, neo-colonialist images of exploitation and overdependence upon an unreliable, single industry (Schneider 1976).

Great interest was expressed in the potential of tourism to contribute to economic development. Tourism was widely acclaimed as generating a multitude of beneficial effects upon such economic indicators as balance of payments, employment, income and tax revenues. Residents of tourist destinations often want tourists to visit, and destinations seek and promote tourism development. They want to enhance their lifestyles through acquisition of better jobs, higher incomes, higher tax revenues and other spin-offs of tourism. In this report I want to describe economic benefits and costs. The economic benefits of tourism include the contributions of tourism to:

1. Foreign exchange earnings and the balance of payments;

2. The generation of income;

3. The generation of employment;

However, in spite of all positive effects, I wanted to find out whether there are any negative consequences of tourism to economic development as well as positive. The economic costs are much less known and costs mentioned in the literature include:

1. The danger of overdependence on tourism;

2. Increased inflation and higher land values;

3.Seasonality;

The balance of payments

The potential contribution of tourism to the balance of payments as an earner of hard currency has been widely recognised. Data from WTO