Which of the following is a near antonym of the word ‘skeptical’?

Read the passage and answer the questions that follow. In all of the world’s emerging economies, tourism is one of the primary industries driving growth and job creation. Even a decade ago, tourists were already spending $295 billion every year in developing countries—which amounts to roughly three times total overseas development assistance to the developing world in 2007—and interest in under-explored and remote travel destinations continues to rise. This signals enormous potential for tourism-driven development in Africa’s emerging markets over the long term. As the sector became incorporated into the debate about global dependency in the 1970s and 1980s, a number of scholars were skeptical of the potential for tourism to have a positive impact beyond strict measures of growth and export earnings. Scholars and policymakers agree that encouraging the development of a robust tourism industry has a direct, positive impact on economic growth by promoting investment in diverse, productive sectors across the economy, such as in construction, infrastructure, local manufacturing, and consumer markets.There are also substantial benefits from tourism that accrue at the local level, including improvements in income distribution, regional development, and employment opportunities for remote and low-skilled workers, which both directly and indirectly impacting poverty levels.Compared to other sectors, tourism also provides a disproportionately high number of jobs for women, who are often difficult to integrate into the formal economy in developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, where women are significantly more likely to be poor and employed in the informal economy, women manage a majority of all hospitality businesses; in Ethiopia, Lesotho, and Mali, they manage at least 80 percent of them. However, many African countries that have previously been considered unattractive tourist destinations due to political instability, violence, or health crises have already managed to transform their images through successful tourism campaigns: For example, Rwanda features its population of endangered mountain gorillas, Mozambique its beaches, and Ethiopia its ancient cultural attractions from the Abyssinian period. It remains to be seen, though, whether these countries will experience the expected economic boom from tourism in the coming years, as has been the case in Mauritius. From the perspective of African governments and development organizations, though, the positive role of tourism is clear—it represents a vital pathway to overcome challenges of development related to foreign exchange earnings and central government debt. The World Bank and U.N. World Tourism Organization predict that tourism will be one of the main drivers of economic growth in Africa over the coming decade. An increasing number of countries, then, have made tourism a central pillar of their economic development and reform programs over the near future. Indeed, Africa’s emerging markets are currently characterized by opportunities for new economic partnerships, diversifying market linkages, and increasing foreign investment and access to international capital. Because of these processes, the continent exhibits a rising middle class with more interest in domestic travel, while improvements in development and stability are making the region substantially more attractive to international visitors than in the past. In this light, market analysts agree that the tourism industry provides one of the best opportunities for capitalizing on the rise of Africa in coming years.In the future, growth in Africa’s tourism industry will primarily be driven by two factors: globalization and infrastructure.