Roots and features of researches about tourist economy (In French)

Of an economic approach of the tourism, made by applications of the instruments of the economist for this new field of investigation, we are gradually spent in a research on a tourist economy based on the specificities of this last one : Its temporal dimension (saisonnality of the activities, variation of the prices, market’s deformations); its spatial economic dimension (transfer of consumptions, incomes, employments, mobility of capital); its micro economic dimension (creation of a tourism’s product – assembly of ill-assorted services-, marketing by package price, imperfect competition, barriers in the entry). More recently it is its registration in yard of savings services societies and its potential of innovations which were revealed. Research in touristic economy needs rigour, coherence to progress in a world of uncertainties; It must necessarily explain, in other words to answer the question: how? While referring to the economists, for many users, the models can help there. But this research, by its characteristics, cannot be satisfied some, because it must aim also to help to understand, in other words to answer the question: why? Try to answer it, widens the field of the approaches possible and joined multidisciplinarity: It is necessary that tourist economy considers that the tourist is not only a consumer of tourism and the Tour operator a producer of services, but that they are, one and the other, consumer and producer of meaning. The force and the difficulty in interpreting this meaning also lie in culture, history, space and its organization.