Euro-Med as A Market-Driven Regionalisation: Measuring The Role Of Tourism Transnational Companies In Integrating European And North African Markets
Euro-Med as A Market-Driven Regionalisation: Measuring The Role Of Tourism Transnational Companies In Integrating European And North African Markets

Summary/Abstract: The governance of North-South integration is one of the issues raised by the “regionalisation of globalization” phenomenon. Whereas “regulatory regionalism” studies have been focusing on the institutional governance of regionalisation, viewing regulation as a result of international public cooperation between equally developed economies, this paper offers an insight into alternative forms of regional integration governance, in particular at the North-South scale. Based on the premise that North-South regionalisation proceeds above all from a market-driven integration led by transnational companies (TNCs), this study intends to introduce an original methodology for analyzing and measuring the role European tourism TNCs plays in the Euro-Med tourism market integration, in the specific case of Tunisia and Morocco. With an emphasis on inter-firm linkages between home companies and indigenous firms, the analyses specify by which means TNCs contribute to deepen the economic integration of the European and North African tourism markets. Field studies focused on four lead TNCs involved in a regional process of production (Accor, Club Méditerranée, TUI Travel, and Thomas Cook) allow identifying four main dynamics of integration which foster regional regulation: standards convergence, formalization, skills transfers, and innovation diffusion. In a second phase, the spatial outcomes of TNCs’ expansion strategies in Tunisia and Morocco are also outlined, before being correlated to the regulatory transfers occurring throughout the production network supervised by northern companies.

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