THE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF NATIONAL TOURISM POLICIES

This paper reviews a variety of approaches to tourism policy development and reports a research study into the issues which influence the development and implementation of national tourism policies, with particular reference to the position of human resource concerns within this process. The study also considered the specific role of national tourism organizations in policy development. The research, based on a postal survey of NTOs, identifies the primarily economic determinants of tourism policy but notes a number of important variations between policy development in developed and developing countries. Human resource concerns feature consistently as factors in policy development but are seen as relatively peripheral to the process.