A Comparative Study of China-U.S. Tourism Characteristic Industry GVC Embedment Degree

As the largest branch of service trade, tourism trade has contributed continuously to the global economy. Starting from the related departments of tourism trade, this article used the method of Wang et al. (2013) to conduct value-added decomposition of the global input-output table for the period 2000-2014 and measured the GVC position and GVC participation index between China and the United States for first time. The author just intends to consider the related tourism industries, but it didn’t integrate the related industries to a complete tourism industry. The comparative study found that China’s road transportation sector has advantage over the United States’, but overall the GVC position and GVC participation index of China tourism characteristic departments are less than the United States’. For the whole embedment degree of GVC, there is still a gap between China and the United States.


Introduction
Bilateral tourism trade, as an important form of international service trade, has continuously increased its share in international trade, and has become an important means for all countries to participate in the international production share and enhance their international competitiveness. In recent years, with the continuous deepening of global production share and the continuous expansion of international tourism, tourism trade, as the largest branch of service trade, has 1 been fully integrated into the development process of global value chains. Inbound and outbound tourism involves many sectors such as transportation, accommodation and catering, travel agencies and tourism operators, postal and express, entertainment, telecommunications and other sectors, and has become one of the most important industries affecting trade growth between China and the United States. In this paper, the calculation does not integrate the components of the tourism industry, such as transportation, accommodation and catering, wholesale and retail, into relatively complete tourism trade data. However, by measuring the GVC position and GVC participation index of highly relevant sectors of tourism trade is often helpful for understanding the GVC embedment degree in tourism trade more intuitively and accurately.
The article is organized as follows: the first part is introduction; the second part is literature review; the third part is analysis of measurement results; and the last part is conclusions and inspirations of this paper.

Literature Review
Most foreign scholars used the input-output method to study the effect of tourism economy (Ruiz, 1985;Fletcher, 1989;Briassoulis, 1991;Surugiu, 2009 However, in the research of tourism trade, the current domestic research mainly focuses on the comparative advantage of traditional total trade competitiveness (Cang Wenyi, 2018) [13]. GVC embedment degree in the tourism characteristics industry has not yet been measured from the perspective of global value chains. Koopman (2010) defines the "GVC position index" and "GVC participation index" to measure the embedment degree of different economies/industries in the Q. Q. Wang global value chain. This article uses its practice to measure the embedment degree of GVC in the tourism characteristics industry in China and the United States.

The GVC Position Index of Tourism Characteristic Industry
The GVC position index of tourism characteristic industry is used to measure the position of tourism characteristic sector t of country c in the global value chain. The calculation formula is as follows:

The GVC Participation Index of Tourism Characteristic Industry
The GVC participation index of tourism characteristic industry is used to measure the participation degree of tourism characteristic sector t of country c in the global value chain. The calculation formula is as follows: Among them, IV ic ic E is the GVC forward participation index, denoting the degree to which the intermediate products exported by tourism characteristic sector t of country c are used by other countries to produce the final product and export it to a third country. The larger the index is, the more upstream of the tourism characteristic sector t of country c in the global value chain is. FV tc tc E is the GVC backward participation index, denoting the degree of foreign added value used in the export of tourism characteristic sector t of country c. The larger the index is, the more downstream of the tourism characteristic sector t of country c in the global value chain is. Therefore, the greater GVC participation index is, the more important position in global value chain the country's participation in international production share has.
Based on the above algorithm, this paper combines the decomposition results of the value-added exports and the calculation of forward linkages to calculate the participation in international production share and position in the global value chain of tourism characteristic industries in China and the United States.

The GVC Position Index of China-U.S. Tourism Characteristics Industry
In Table 1

The GVC Participation Index of China-U.S. Tourism Characteristics Industry
In Table 2, from the perspective of the GVC Forward Participation Index, the   In Table 3, from the comprehensive GVC engagement index, China's GVC participation in recent years has been declining, while the United States has been rising. In general, compared with the United States, the participation of GVCs in China's tourism industry is much lower, and most of them are located downstream of the global value chain. However, the position of China's land transport sector in the global value chain has always been better than United States.

Conclusions and Inspirations
Through calculations, we find that the  the supply side of the tourism industry, expand the length of entry and exit tourism products and service chains, and actively enhance the GVC position and participation of relevant sectors in the tourism industry in the global value chain.