Honduras

Tourism has been recommended as a viable means of economic development for Honduras for several decades. Although tourism emerged in the late 1960s, it developed slowly until the mid-1990s. The Honduran government began actively marketing and promoting tourism development as a national development strategy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the 1980s, the government created a set of laws establishing special tourism zones. These zones helped attract direct foreign investments by providing tax and import exceptions and incentives. In addition, the government of Honduras passed one law that allowed foreign property ownership and another that created tourism free zones, which exempt investors from import taxes for equipment and supplies for tourism projects and paying income taxes for 10 years.

By the year 2000, foreign ...