I know your comment is a "hot take", but the thing is about Tourism as an industry, is that the places where that /is/ the industry end up not gaining any other industries. So they become stuck as a "tourism" industry place
Similar to a country sitting on a large amount of natural resources like oil/gas. You don't have to bother about making your population productive.
Allowed all your productive jobs to be offshored? Mine the natural resource of tourists, as long as there was a golden age that left something interesting for them to visit.
It is exactly like oil and “resource curse”, for many poor countries.
The pay is generally minimum wage and the only ones who see big returns are the owners of capital. It’s not a distributive industry. If you have too much of your country’s economy invested, I’d say you’re almost always looking at an unhealthy economy.
I would argue that while there are some similarities, there are also many differences, and that claiming it's not distributive is incorrect. The number of workers I interact with (and to whom the money I spend flows) as a tourist is quite large compared to the number of people who benefit from use of an extracted natural resource.
> I know your comment is a "hot take", but the thing is about Tourism as an industry, is that the places where that /is/ the industry end up not gaining any other industries.
This discussion is about Barcelona.
Barcelona is one of the richest regions in Europe. It's hardly a third-world hellhole or a banana republic.
