NTOs and State Policy: The Paradigms of Political Economy and Insitutional Response to Tourism in Times of Economic Crisis

Abstract

In this paper, we look at the three broad capitalist models for political/economic organization upon which states organize themselves and then explore examples of those states and each country’s response to tourism. In order to investigate this, we take two examples of social democratic states (Sweden and Finland), two examples of liberal states (the USA and Canada), and two examples of mercantilist states (South Korea and Japan) to see how the state organizes itself in terms of tourism. We find that countries with liberal, mercantilist, and social democratic political and economic systems have very different institutions to deal with tourism, with liberal states tending to have weak state institutional responses to tourism while mercantilist states have strong ones. The investigation has implications for states in the current financial crisis, since the state’s response to the crisis will either be consistent with the political philosophy upon which the state’s institutions rest or run counter to the prevailing political and economic thinking upon which the state’s institutions rest.

Keywords: National Tourism Organization, State Policy, Capitalist Models