Reviewing Uganda's tourism sector for economic and social upgrading

Abstract

In tourism the use of sector’s employment opportunities and contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) as a measure of its performance may be deceptive as the sector is prone to foreign domination and has a lot of ‘leakages’. Global production network (GPN) analysis is becoming a popular analytical framework for understanding industries like tourism. In this paper, we review literature on global production networks, with a focus on the tourism sector in Uganda. The main objective of the study is to establish information availability and point out existing information gaps in understanding Uganda’s participation in the tourism GPN with respect to economic and social upgrading/downgrading. It was observed that the tourism sector remains an important avenue for economic growth and poverty reduction, and has experienced growth in investment along the value chain, attractiveness and operational complexity. Information gaps were observed on levels of functional integration among tourism actors, impacts of tourism on employment and poverty reduction among gender and social classes and factors that will affect trajectory for social and economic upgrading/downgrading for the tourism actors in Uganda