Asian tourism to rebound next year, ADB reports

MANILA (Reuters) – From tropical beaches to Beijing’s Forbidden City and the Taj Mahal in India, tourism is a big driver of Asian economies and is poised to rebound next year, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said recently.

Tourism in Asia was badly shaken by the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington and the travel and tourism sector in the region’s developing nations grew only 1.7 percent in 2001 after jumping 8.2 percent the previous year, it said in a report.

The sector would edge up 1.8 percent this year before showing a sustained recovery in 2003 and then settling down to robust long-term growth of 3.6 percent per annum.

The bank said many governments were now looking to the Asian region itself for tourist arrivals.

“Governments and the tourism industry have taken steps to mitigate weakness in the industry, including security measures to restore consumer confidence and increased promotional deals, particularly aimed at local or regional tourists,” it said.

“Developing Asia as a whole — China and India particularly — is expected to enjoy buoyant growth in tourism,” it said, though it noted that nations with internal security problems would take longer to recover.

In China, the world’s fifth-most visited country and the one that makes the most money from tourism in Asia, the number of job losses in 2001 and 2002 because of the global slowdown will reach 1.8 million or 3.4 percent of all tourism employment.

For India, the comparable number is 900,000.

Tourism accounts for 10 percent of world gross domestic product (GDP) and about eight percent of all employment.

In Asia, it accounts for 9.2 percent of GDP and about seven percent of employment, but nearly half of the world’s tourism jobs are located in the region.

China employs 50 million people in tourism and India 23 million. The sun-kissed Maldives, a chain of coral islands in the Indian Ocean, employs just 52,000 people in tourism but it accounts for over 82 percent of its GDP, the bank noted.

The bank, established in 1966, is a multilateral development finance institution dedicated to reducing poverty in Asia and the Pacific.