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Trump Victory, what could it mean for Tourism, Ecotourism and other Green sectors?

Predicting the impact of Donald Trump's win is even more tricky than was predicting the outcome of this extremely tight contest. It depends on whether the new administration really attempts to implement any of Trump's more controversial, and sometimes highly offensive to ethnic groups, campaign promises, which would result in major changes in US policy as well as in repercussions and reactions by affected countries and population groups: for example, more stringent security-checks and Visa policy for travellers, returning immigrants to Latin American countries, banning Muslim travel to the US, raising public infrastructure spending to 1 trillion (which may damage the environment), cutting all spending related to combatting Climate Change, withdrawal from the Paris Treaty, heavy tariffs on Chinese imports, requesting that NATO partners increase their defense spending, cancelling free trade agreements, improved (or worsened) relations with Russia, Turkey, Cuba and more specific impacts such as blocking renewable energy investment, schemes aiming to reduce airline greenhouse gas emissions, delaying infrastructure and the mainstreaming of electric automobiles and so on. We have to remember that mainstream travellers are easily discouraged from visiting a destination where they may feel unwanted, whereas Ecotourists generally are more daring, but nearly all prefer a peaceful and safe destination. It may be relevant, that the President-elect is also a highly-successful and globally active Hotel developer, among other capacities, thus he has, unusually for a President, a first-hand knowledge of the great potential of Tourism and Hospitality. On the other hand, he is also known to object against the formation of worker unions in his hotels. Otherwise, it is sad to note the low vote tally of the US Greens. It is likely that polarisation led some of the antisystemic blue-collar voters that previously supported Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump (most probably abstained) and some green-collar voters may have chosen Hillary Clinton as the lesser of two evils. The US vote will certainly have repercussions, also unpredictable, on key European elections scheduled for 2017 including France and Germany, where the hard, xenophobic right is currently rising. Let us hope that this lust for erecting taller national borders (at the same time when we need borders to come down so that we can cooperate in tackling the environmental-economic crisis and the extremism it fuels) is only a temporary reaction by those who have been hurt by neoliberal globalisation and not something permanent emanating from lowly subsconcious depths of the human psyche.

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