Regional Tourism Development in Southeast Asia

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to address the role of tourism to the regional economic development of Southeast Asian economies. The assessment was accomplished by investigating the state of tourism development and by determining the drawbacks of tourism industry existed in Southeast Asia. This paper also explores strategies required to develop tourism collectively in order to achieve gains through establishing favourable environment and mobilizing endowed strategic resources. The assessment suggests the need to give attention on formulating transparent objective, implementation and integration of these objectives into national plans, participation of community people, tourism entrepreneurship and cooperation and integration of governments in developing tourism. Successfully overcoming the difficulties of regional tourism development, Southeast Asian tourism industry has the potential to reap benefit from the economies of scale.

Keywords:

• Regional tourism
• collaboration
• policy
• strategy
• economies of scale
• Southeast Asia

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohammad Nurul Huda Mazumder

Mohammad Nurul Huda Mazumder is currently Post-doc research fellow at Laval University, Canada. Before joining at Laval University, he was senior lecturer at Multimedia University, Malaysia. He has obtained PhD in Tourism Economics. He has published more than 25 international peer reviewed journal articles. His research papers appeared in the Journal of Vacation Marketing, Journal of Developing Areas, and Progress in Development Studies, etc. His research interests cover tourism economics, tourism management, microfinance, environmental economics, cultural management, multivariate data analysis, impact assessment. In additional, he has expertise in Consultancy and project, and grant writing.

Mast Afrin Sultana

Mast Afrin Sultana is serving as the Director (Administration) of ‘The Brain Technologies Ltd.’, Dhaka, Bangladesh and an independent researcher on Organizational behaviour, Developing countries competitiveness and Cross-cultural management issues. Her research finding was published at “International Journal of Business and Management” and presented to the AEDAUL international conference, 2012, Laval University, Quebec, Canada. Email: [email protected].

Abdullah Al-Mamun

Abdullah is serving as Senior Lecturer at Faculty of Business and Entrepreneurship, University Malaysia Kelantan, Malaysia. He received his MBA (Major in Finance) and Ph.D. in Development Economics from Multimedia University. He has published 27 articles in international journals including ASEAN Economic Bulletin, the Journal of Developing Areas, etc. His current research interests cover wide range of topics in Development Economics, including: Poverty, Social Capital, Empowerment, Economic Vulnerability, Micro-enterprise Development, Microcredit, Economic Impact of Climate Change, and Entrepreneurship.