For a government that has spent a decade building a tourism industry around five-star hotel chains, Formula 1 circuits and international summits clustered in a single city, the message from the World Bank last week in Baku has been eye-catching. Azerbaijan, according to the World Bank, “has to stop branding itself as Baku and develop a non-hydrocarbons economy for the rest of the country, or risk wasting one of its few sectors that can offer employment to those who will lose jobs in the hydrocarbon sector.”

The occasion was the presentation of the World Bank's "Azerbaijan Country Economic Memorandum Spring 2026", unveiled at an event titled "Unlocking Azerbaijan's Tourism Potential to Drive Economic Growth and Diversification". According to Rolande Pryce, the World Bank's regional director for the South Caucasus, tourism must move away from cities to focus on the regions, since the industry does not live up to its full potential in terms of visitor numbers and employment. As one might have expected, the choice of date was deliberate, since according to the World Bank's estimates, the growth of the country's economy in 2025 was only 1.4 percent, and given the latest numbers, it does not look like it will exceed it.

Perhaps, none of this is abstract for Baku's planners. The country's tourism recovery, robust through 2022–24, has since gone into reverse. The number of foreign arrivals in the first five months of 2026 contracted 11% compared to the previous year to 871,700 people, and the expenditure of........

© AzerNews