Third year PhD candidate at the University of Oradea, under the guidance of Professor Mrs. Alina Bădulescu in the doctoral research project entitled: “Doctoral studies and Ph.D. candidates for competitive research on a knowledge based society”, a co-financed project by the European Social Fund through the Sectoral Operational Program for Human Resources Development 2007 – 2013, Priority Axis 1. “Education and training in support for growth and development of a knowledge based society” I chose to present this subject in order to demonstrate the connection that exists between tourism and development. Having as research topic “Tourism and development in the Euro regional context† I dedicated a subchapter of this thesis in presenting tourism as a development strategy.

Thus we have analysed a series of specialised papers encountered at national and international level in order to achieve a synthesis about the addressed topic. Authors like Sharpley and Telfer (2002) found that the specialised literature in the tourism domain contains few articles on the relationship between tourism and development despite the fact that tourism remains an important area of the economic policy regarding development in most regions of the world.

Writings on tourism, that debate development, are often written in terms of the impact of tourism on the environment in which it unfolds.

Following statistical data collected on Faits saillants OMT du tourisme, 2011 Edition I found that indeed tourism is an important element in the development strategies.

The research methodology that was used consisted in documentation from the specialised literature and the site http://mkt.unwto.org/sites/all/files/docpdf/unwtohighlights11frhr.pdf in order to gather representative data on the evolution of international tourism for the 1950-2010 period, also highlighting the potential success of tourism in the economic development.

For this study to be more representative I presented the evolution of international tourist arrivals in the main tourist regions of the world. The graphical representation shows that Europe is the main destination for tourists from around the world.

Projections made by UNWTO (2011), confirm the fact that international tourism is continuously expanding, in 2020, the number of international tourists arrivals is approaching 1.6 billion.