Tourism in transition: Economic change in Central Europe

Book abstract:

Part of the 'Tourism, Retailing and Consumption' series, this text provides a detailed analysis of the role of tourism in the economic transition which has swept Central and Eastern Europe since 1989. The process of transformation after 1989 sought to create market economies in very short time periods. One of the possible rewards available to these countries was potential membership of the European Union, and the interim judgement on this was delivered in July 1997 when the European Commission recommended that priority should be given to the accession of six applicants, but at the 1999 Helsinki summit this was extended to all the candidates from Central and Eastern Europe. The huge efforts required to reorientate these economies has demanded a high price, in terms of both high unemployment and massive cuts in living standards, and social polarisation. Little research attention has been to given to the role of tourism in the transformation, yet tourism was often at the forefront of economic changes in the region. A strongly collectivist model of domestic and international tourism was swiftly replaced with a largely privatised tourism sector, where domestic consumption was increasingly shaped by market relationships, and international demand was shaped by the business and leisure interests of Western Europe.

The aims of 'Tourism in transition: Economic change in Central Europe' are to analyse the changing role of tourism in the process of transformation in Czechoslovkia and in the two independent Czech and Slovak Republics which emerged in 1993. The creation of two separate states in 1993 provides a virtually unique opportunity to study the impact of divergent state policies in the Czech and Slovak Republics on the differential evolution of what had been a single national tourism system for much of the twentieth century.

Allan M. Williams is a member of the International Geographical Union Commission on Sustainable Tourism. Vladimír Baláz is a Research Fellow at Exeter University.