Le tourisme continue à être l'un des éléments les plus forts de la croissance mondiale (Tourism continues to be one of the strongest elements of world's growth)
The world economy is growing, and tourism continues to be one of the strongest elements in that growth, as it has usually been for about half a century. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that world GDP increased by 5.2% in 2011 - a very substantial margin over the 1.1% increase in the world population.
In an uncertain world...
Does anyone need reminding that we live in an uncertain world? Economically, it is still wildly off-balance after the disasters of 2008-09 - and, if anything, the ongoing saga of the euro crisis, by focusing so narrowly on the public-sector deficits of Greece and a few other eurozone countries, has tended to shift attention away from those imbalances.
Elsewhere in the world, signs of those imbalances are reflected in some surprisingly weak figures for economic growth (eg in Brazil, Russia and Australia), high figures for inflation (eg in India, Turkey, Argentina and, again, Russia), as well as erratic commodity prices.There was also the inevitable crop of man-made and natural disasters last year, many with purely local consequences, a few with regional or even global ones.
Worst was the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami off northeast Japan in March and the subsequent destruction of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants, but there were also very serious floods in Thailand from July through December, a terrible tornado season in the USA, two serious typhoons in the Philippines, and an unusually long catalogue of other natural disasters in 2011.