As a conceptual theoretical paper, this study focuses on the dynamic impact of tourism dominance on economic resilience—a research gap insufficiently addressed in existing literature. Tourism-driven development represents a prevalent growth strategy adopted by numerous small island nations worldwide. By integrating specialization theory, path dependence theory, and industrial lock-in theory, this paper constructs an analytical framework delineating the linkage between tourism dominance and economic resilience, and systematically unpacks the evolutionary logic of economic resilience within tourism-dominated economies. Theoretically, this study proposes a theoretical hypothesis of an inverted U-shaped nonlinear relationship between tourism dominance and economic resilience: as tourism dominance rises, economic resilience evolves across two qualitatively distinct stages. During the early phase of tourism expansion, three positive mechanisms—resource agglomeration effects, knowledge spillover effects, and institutional adaptation effects—jointly generate specialization dividends, which strengthen the economic system’s resistance and recoverability. Once tourism dominance surpasses a critical threshold, three countervailing mechanisms (industrial structural rigidity, asset specificity traps, and institutional-cognitive lock-in) trigger path dependence and trigger a sustained decline in economic resilience. This paper further identifies three heterogeneous post-shock recovery trajectories: rapid V-shaped recovery, slow U-shaped recovery, and prolonged L-shaped recession. It also disentangles the divergent evolutionary characteristics of economic resilience across its three core dimensions: resistance, recoverability, and transformability. This theoretical framework offers a systematic interpretation for the sustainable development of tourism-dependent economies, while providing analytical support for setting early-warning thresholds of tourism reliance and designing forward-looking industrial diversification strategies.
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