Transforming tourism into a successful intervention strategy to decrease income inequality

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes why tourism has failed to reduce income inequality worldwide, despite its success in some countries. While examining the connection between income inequality and tourism development, with an extensive data set of 110 countries for the past 25 years, this study finds that the strength of the relationship between the Gini index and other variables is not high. The low literacy rate and poor communication ability prevented the participation of the illiterate population in tourism activities that demanded higher levels of interaction with the tourists.

KEYWORDS:

• Income inequality
• tourism revenue
• literacy rate
• enabling atmosphere
• threshold estimation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).