Global Perspective

That’s myself. I am Emeritus Professor of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, and I have spent my career in the study of tourism and certainly of its implications.

So the objectives of this presentation as I said are four. We want to look at some the highlights of tourism development over the last 65 years. We then want to ask ourselves what has been some of the institutional effects of this. And I want to concentrate on the emergence of international organizations either specifically for tourism or highly related to it. Third point as I’ve already said I would like to look at the role of governments in this process. And then as an outsider to China, I will look at this historic review and ask myself. What does this mean? What implications might there be for the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative?

Now it’s usual to start at the beginning. but for this presentation I want to start at the end. And ask ourselves a question

in terms of international tourism: where are we now? And if we look at the statistics of international tourism we can go back to 1950, that’s when the first series of statistics were introduced and have since been continued. Now there are two indicators in this series. One is the number of international tourist arrivals. And very briefly, an international tourist is someone who crosses a border from one country to another and travels for leisure purposes. So someone travelling from Beijing to Guangzhou is not an international tourism, he or she is a domestic tourist. But someone say going from China to Malaysia or say to South Korea, for example, are international tourists, because they cross national boundaries.

Now if we look at this first figure, in international tourist arrivals. In 1950 as best we could estimate, there were 25 million international tourist trips. And you see the subsequent figures up to 2016 where there are now 1,235 million tourist trips. That is people crossing international boundaries travelling for leisure purposes. The World Tourism Organization which publishes this figure says that between 2010 and 2030 there’s going to be a growth rate of about 3.3 percent annually in tourist arrivals. And they are estimating1.8 billion tourists will arrive globally. So these figures then tell us that tourism is a very large international activity. The second indicator of the growth and the value of tourism is the earnings that countries receive from tourist visits.

We call this international tourism receipts. They are always stated in US dollars. And again look at the figures, in 1950 2 billions, 2000 495 billions, and 2016 1220 billions. So obviously tourism does generate very very big amounts of money.