Tourism Visitor Export, Income Generation and Employment Capacity: A Comparative Analysis of the Tourism Industries of India, China and Malaysia.

The tourism industry is a significant creator of employment opportunities. Tourism as a business encourages various other service sectors like hotels, resorts and guest house services, handicraft business and travel agencies. Travel & Tourism Economic Impact: World (2019) underlines that travel and tourism sector accounts for 10.4% of global GDP and 319 million jobs or 10% of total employment in 2018. As per the World Bank Ranking, China at 2nd position, India at 6th position, and Malaysia at 37th position are the rising nations on the global tourism front in the region. Tourism is the largest service industry in India and is widely used as an instrument of growth of national income, poverty alleviation, infrastructure development and employment generation. The present paper is an in-depth study, analyzing the visitor exports and income generation (GDP) vis-à-vis employment capacity creation by the tourism industry in India, China and Malaysia analyzed over a period of two decades (1995-2015). The findings reveal the usefulness of tourism for India as an instrument to set up the largest contributing parallel tourism economy, facilitating tourism entrepreneurship, leading to business development, especially in rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]