Some Countries Have Five-Star Resorts Feet Away From Roads With No Running Water. Economists Call This the Tourism Enclave Problem

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Fly into certain beach destinations across the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa and the airport transfer bus can carry a traveler from an air-conditioned terminal to an infinity-pool resort without the trip ever passing through anything that looks like the actual country. Development economists have a specific term for this pattern: the tourism enclave, a resort or resort zone built to First World infrastructure standards that operates almost entirely disconnected from the roads, utilities, and economy of the community immediately surrounding it.

Why Tourism Revenue Often Skips the Local Economy

A piece published by Palladium Magazine lays out a blunt thesis in its headline: no country has ever gotten rich from tourism alone, largely because tourism revenue tends to concentrate in foreign-owned hotel chains, imported goods and food to supply resorts, and a relatively small class of local elites connected to the industry, rather than diffusing broadly through the local economy the way manufacturing or agricultural export revenue typically does. The article argues that tourism-dependent economies frequently end up with impressive infrastructure numbers, airport capacity, hotel room counts, resort square footage, that mask a stagnant or declining standard of living for the residents who live around, rather than inside, that infrastructure.

Research summarized by The Conversation on how holidaying in developing countries affects local inequality found that tourism growth in a destination can actively widen the gap between rich and poor residents, since the jobs and investment tourism generates tend to flow disproportionately to people who already have capital, land, or connections, while low-wage service jobs in resorts and low-margin informal vending are what is left for everyone else. The wider a country’s tourism sector grows without deliberate redistribution policy, the research suggests, the more that growth can entrench rather than reduce local inequality.

The Overcrowding Side of the Same Problem

A McKinsey report on managing overcrowding in tourism destinations approaches the same gap from a different angle, documenting how destinations that build tourist infrastructure faster than they build local infrastructure, roads, water systems, waste management, end up with visible strain: garbage collection systems designed for a small local population overwhelmed by a much larger seasonal tourist population, water systems that prioritize hotel guest usage over surrounding residential access, and public transit that serves resort corridors while local neighborhoods a few miles away go without. The infrastructure gap, in this framing, is not simply about wealth. It is about which population a government or developer chooses to build for first.

• Economists use the term tourism enclave for resort zones that operate largely disconnected from surrounding local infrastructure
• Research links tourism growth in developing economies to rising local inequality, not just rising local income
• McKinsey has documented water, waste, and transit systems built to prioritize resort guests over surrounding residents
• Foreign ownership of hotel chains and imported supply chains often limit how much tourist spending reaches the local economy

Measuring the Gap Nationally

The World Economic Forum’s Travel and Tourism Development Index 2024 attempts to measure this gap systematically by scoring countries on both tourism infrastructure and broader enabling conditions, including safety, health, and environmental sustainability for the resident population, not just visitor-facing amenities. The index consistently shows a pattern where destinations popular for their resort infrastructure score notably lower on categories measuring the resident population’s access to basic services, a quantitative confirmation of what many travelers have observed anecdotally: the road leading to the resort is often paved, lit, and maintained to a different standard than the road leading away from it toward where the resort’s own staff actually live.

The Countries Researchers Point to Most Often

Development researchers studying this gap consistently point to a similar set of destinations: heavily resort-dependent Caribbean nations where all-inclusive properties import much of their food and staff supply chains from outside the local economy, Southeast Asian beach destinations where rapid, often under-regulated resort construction has outpaced municipal water and waste infrastructure, and parts of East Africa where safari lodge revenue is concentrated among international operators while surrounding communities see comparatively little direct benefit despite living immediately adjacent to the wildlife the entire industry is built around. In each case, the pattern is less about any single country’s policy failure and more about a structural feature of tourism-led development: capital-intensive resort infrastructure can be built quickly by outside investors, while the local infrastructure and institutions needed to broadly distribute the resulting revenue take far longer to build and require political will that resort development itself does not automatically generate.

Some destinations have made real progress narrowing the gap, generally by requiring higher local ownership stakes in tourism infrastructure, mandating minimum local sourcing and hiring quotas for resorts, or directing a share of tourism tax revenue specifically toward the municipalities hosting resort development rather than into general national budgets. Those policy interventions tend to be the difference between countries where tourism growth has measurably lifted broad local living standards and countries where the resorts keep getting nicer while the surrounding towns stay exactly where they started.

Costa Rica is frequently cited by development economists as one of the more successful counterexamples, having built its tourism strategy explicitly around locally owned ecolodges and community-run reserves rather than large foreign-owned resort chains, a model credited with distributing tourism revenue more broadly across rural communities than the resort-enclave model common elsewhere in Central America and the Caribbean. That comparison does not mean Costa Rica has fully solved the problem, but it does demonstrate that the enclave pattern is a policy choice made through land use and ownership rules, not an unavoidable feature of tourism-driven development.

None of this means travelers should avoid these destinations, since tourism jobs, however imperfectly distributed, remain a meaningful income source in many of these economies. But understanding the enclave structure changes what a traveler is actually looking at when they admire a resort’s infrastructure. The five-star amenities are frequently a genuinely separate economic system built parallel to, rather than integrated with, the community whose land and labor made the resort possible in the first place.