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 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. "