zlacker

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.

>>phatfi+(OP)
That’s exactly right.

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.

>>kranke+T8
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.

>>dnissl+J9
It’s not as bad, but fundamentally the vast majority of tourism workers earn minimum wage.

So you can have some tourism to keep some people employed, sure. But if it’s +15-20% of your economy, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.