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| INSTITUTIONAL OPPORTUNISTIC BEHAVIOR IN TOURISM INVESTMENT PROMOTION——A Case from Western China |
| BAO Ji-gang1, ZUO Bing1,2 |
1. Center for Tourism Planning and Research, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China;
2. School of Tourism, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Kunming 650221, China |
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Abstract Tourism is one of the effective tools to facilitate the transformation of unvalued resources into capital goods. For this reason, most underdeveloped areas in western China have made preferential policies to encourage the outer investors to invest into local tourism industry.
Using qualitative research method and through on-site research, this paper studied the whole process of an eastern enterprise investing into a western destination's tourism development and measured the benefits and costs of the enterprise.
The typical case showed that in the process of business and investment promotion in western areas, the outer investors always had motivations to take opportunistic behaviors to obtain favorable policies and excessive profits such as bargaining with the local government, intentionally faking the amount of investment or rent-seeking. As a result, tourism investment did not necessarily act as a developing agent. Instead, investors dominated the tourism industry in the host area which led to the repatriation of large amount of tourism yields.
Under this circumstances, tourism did not help to balance the original spatial socio-economic inequality between developed and developing areas but facilitated the concentration of the metropolitan economy and even reinforced spatial uneven economy.
From the viewpoint of institutional economics, this paper pointed out that it was due to the unequal power relationship between outer investors and host regions and institutional faultinesses in our transformation economy such as information asymmetry, lack of monitor and the unreasonable merit system for the officials that led to the investor's opportunistic behaviors. Therefore, there needs to improve our policies and institutions to stop the investors' institutional opportunistic behaviors, in order to guarantee the host areas might benefits a lot from tourism development. Among them, three means are critical: First, reforming the official merit system from the GDP to the welfares of local people; second, levying the Property Tax on investors to prevent them from faking the amount of investment; Third, Changing the role of local government or community from leaseholder into shareholder.
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Received: 10 January 2008
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2008, Vol. 23 
