A critical perspective on tourism employment

Abstract

This article presents a critical analysis of tourism employment and sustainable development in the context of regional inequality, poverty alleviation and internal migration with special references to Turkey. It was found that although Turkey has experienced rapid tourism growth in terms of volume and value, it has contributed little to reduce unemployment and poverty rates among regions, and migration from relatively less developed regions to more developed regions for seeking a better job opportunity. It concludes that benefiting from tourism as a developmental instrument in this context is an enormously difficult task to achieve owing to the prevailing socio-economic conditions in the developing world, and thus necessitates reconfiguring hard political and economic choices, and decisions based upon complex socio-economic trade-offs.