Tourism development has been hailed by the International Financial
Institutions (IFIs--World Bank, International Monetary Fund) and the
World Trade Organization as a means for economic gain by creating jobs
and enabling states to earn foreign exchange to invest in development.
It has also been a strategy used in economically disadvantaged regions
of the U.S. This article explores the often overlooked negative impacts
of the strategy.

This power point presentation with reference to Catholic Social Teaching critiques globalization through three lens: globalization as a new perception of space relations, as global economic integration and as an economic doctrine. It concludes with alternative directions to pursue to bring about a more just future.

"The United States has been aggressively pursuing deregulation and privatization of service sectors for some years at the federal, state and local levels. The impact of privatization and deregulation in the US is abundantly clear and sends a message of caution to other countries' deregulation and privatization agenda that is being pushed globally. This paper presents three short case studies: Crisis in the state of California, The Privatization and Closing of DC General Hospital Washington, D.C. and Water Privatization in Puerto Rico."

"This paper gives comprehensive background on the political economy of tourism in countries of the North and the South, both in a historic and a current context. The first section of this paper highlights some of the contradictory aspects of ‘tourism development' and economic development from a historical perspective. Section II examines tourism and development from the perspective of social and gender equity. Section III examines the impacts of tourism liberalization, with a particular focus on the implications of the major instrument of liberalization in the tourism sector, the GATS. Following this discussion Williams rounds out the paper with a return to the gender implications of GATS-driven tourism liberalization. This paper was released as the second paper in the the Center of Concern and International Gender and Trade Network Occasional Paper Series on Gender, Development and Trade. "