Functions, aims and objectives of tourism according to World Tourism Organization
Tourism has become a phenomenon of every day life for hundreds of millions of people today: (a) It encompasses all free movements of persons away from their places of residence and work, as well as the service industries created to satisfy the needs resulting from these movements; (b) It constitutes an activity essential to the lives of human beings and modern societies, having become an important form of using the free time of individuals and the main vehicle for interpersonal relations and political, economic and cultural contact made necessary by the internationalization of all sectors of the life of nation; (c) It should be the concern of everyone. It is both a consequence and a decisive factor of the quality of life in contemporary society.
There should accord increasingly sustained attention to tourism with a view to ensuring its development in harmony with the other fundamental needs and activities of societies. Tourism can be an effective instrument far socioeconomic growth for all countries, if at the same time the necessary measures are taken to tackle the more urgent national priorities and to allow the national economy to reach an acceptable level of self sufficiency in which the country does not have to spend in excess of what it can hope to earn from tourism.
According to World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), tourism is ‘number one in the international services trade’, accounting for 40 per cent of global trade in services and 6 per cent of total world trade.1 The tourism industry directly provides around 3 per cent of global employment, or 192 million jobs – the equivalent to one in every twelve jobs in the formal sector. The International Labour Organization (ILO) predicts that this share is likely to rise to 251.6 million jobs by 2010, or one in every eleven formal sector jobs.
Tourism also has an indirect impact beyond employment through tourism related goods and services, air travel and global consumption patterns. The relevance of tourism for global political economy can no longer be ignored by analysts wishing to account for changing global patterns in poverty and inequality. Despite this, with a handful of exceptions, tourism as a significant feature of contemporary global political economy has thus far attracted little attention in the field of international political economy.
Achieving United Nations (UN) specialised agency status in November 2003, UNWTO is the only international institution existing solely to promote the spread of the tourism industry across the globe. Its role can be understood in a number of ways: as a campaigning organisation for the tourism industry; as a donor for tourism development projects; and as the primary source of research and statistics on global tourism. As a result of the macroeconomic developmental benefits to be gained from the tourism industry – including employment and foreign exchange generation – a growing number of countries are generating ‘national tourism development plans’, in which tourism is seen as the foundation of a country’s development.
Playing a consultancy role in such strategies, UNWTO needs to be taken seriously not merely as an industry-specific UN agency, but as an organisation with the ability to influence national and international development policy, albeit within the confines of the dominant development paradigm. Tourism development’ as framed by UNWTO is presented as a problematic process, because of the potential conflict between poverty reduction and liberalisation of the tourism industry.
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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