Curing the ‘Beach Disease’: Corruption and the Potential of Tourismled Transformation for Developing Countries and Transitional Economies

The continuous global growth of the tourism sector over the last decades has highlighted its potential as a developmental strategy for developing countries and transitional economies. The attractiveness of a tourism-led economic transformation lies in the capability of attracting foreign investment and generating significant income even when subjected to unfavorable infrastructural-, business-, economic- and social-conditions. Empirically, nonetheless, tourism competitiveness, potential and transformational success greatly varies between country-cases. This paper explores and discusses a number of potential factors (Regulatory framework- and Safety/Security-related) suggested in tourism literature as responsible for such outcome variations. Following the quantitative/statistical analysis of multi-source combined secondary data, there is inadequate quantitative support for the factors suggested. To account for the resulting theoretical (or explanatory) gap, the role of corruption is proposed as a latent and under-researched factor for a better understanding, exploration and implementation of tourism-led economic growth.