Global Value Chains and National Tourism Carbon Competitiveness

With the emergence of global value chains (GVCs), imported products and services play a critical role in the quality and quantity of tourism services. What to import and how much to import thus concern the trade-offs of maintaining economic prosperity, reducing domestic and global carbon emissions and improving tourism carbon efficiency at destinations. This study clarifies the relationship between tourism and GVCs and presents an environmentally extended input–output model to assess the distribution of tourism’s economic and environmental effects in global segments. We argue that GVCs increase a nation’s tourism carbon competitiveness and relieve global carbon pressure when imports (1) are high in carbon contents but low in economic linkage, (2) facilitate the transition of domestic businesses toward better energy efficiency, and (3) are produced with a lower carbon intensity than the domestic production technology. An empirical case of the bilateral travel between Taiwan and Japan is applied