Girish Prayag
SKEMA Business School

A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR UNDERSTANDING TOURISM DEVELOPMENT IN INDIAN-OCEAN ISLANDS

This study reviews existing published academic literature on five Indian Ocean islands namely, Madagascar, Maldives, Mauritius, Reunion Island, and Seychelles, and offers future research directions. The Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) list of tourism and hospitality journals was used to identify articles related to tourism development of these small island developing states (SIDS) and Google Scholar (GS) was used to identify their citation counts. The findings indicated that Mauritius remains the most researched while Reunion Island is the least. Researchers employ mostly quantitative techniques with modeling/forecasting papers having the highest citation counts. The review clearly showed a lack of studies on the hospitality sector, host culture, tourism impacts and policy, and comparative studies on these islands. Future research directions are offered.

Key words: SIDS, tourism development, Indian-Ocean, Google Scholar

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