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While air transport is by no means the only revolutionary technological development of our time, it has been a major factor among those which are changing the world's commercial and industrial organization.  It could be argued, for example, that the European Common Market would have come about regardless of whether the airplane existed, but it is certainly true that its existence has made this new economic community the more inevitable.  By the same token, air service has undoubtedly speeded and facilitated both international trade and the actual internationalization of industry.  Leaving aside, as one must in this paper, the obvious consequences of air cargo service and the economic influences of air mail, international passenger service has greatly extended the trading range of many industries by making new territories directly accessible to their sales and service efforts.  It has also made it possible for industry to establish and to control efficiently branch facilities and affiliated industries on a wide international basis.  The very rapidly growing American participation in overseas industry--and the complementary expansion of other interests in North America--are undoubtedly due in large measure to the ease with which investors and management can maintain close day-to-day relations with otherwise remote enterprises. 

Even at this moment, the bulk of the passengers carried on international air services are persons traveling for pleasure, rather than business.  If air transport has removed from industry the inhibitions of time and distance, it has opened even wider horizons for the tourist, to whom these handicaps have been even more serious.  There is now no resort in the world which is beyond the effective reach of the vacationer with a three-week--or even a fortnight's--holiday.

Price is (and at some level of the market will always be) a deterrent, but even at today's prices, the volume of international tourism has been increasing substantially each year.

Tourism is not an area in which air transport can claim any exclusiveness.  The great bulk still moves by surface transport--by automobile, by bus, by railway and by steamship.  But air transport has opened up new areas to tourist development on an entirely unprecedented scale; and the more remote the area, the more directly has its influence been felt.  The phenomenal resort development of Hawaii, the Caribbean, and Tahiti has been predicated almost entirely on air service; and while the tourist industries of other countries are at least partially fed by populations much closer by, they depend to a very large extent on what air transport can bring them.

In a purely economic sense, this growth of international tourism has been one of the most significant phenomena of the postwar era.  It has been particularly helpful in enabling many nations to recover their economic equilibrium after the war, for it has given them a new and important means of earning foreign currency out of locally available resources.  For the last ten years, it has in fact meant an injection of almost $50,000 million worth of foreign exchange into the world's economy--and the importance of this sum can be gauged by comparison with the roughly $25,000 million involved in U.S. aid to Western Europe since the end of the war.


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