关键词: 旅游业; GDP; 旅游总收入; 旅游业增加值

Abstract:

In this paper, the author used logical reasoning methods to discuss several conceptual understanding of the tourism’s contribution to the national economy. This paper points out that: (1) Tourism gross income is the sum of domestic tourism consumption and tourism service export, so the idea that tourism gross income can't compare with GDP is not correct.(2) Since there are many differences in the scope of tourism, tourism gross income cannot be simply equal to the total output value of tourism.(3)Tourism value added index facilitates the comparison of tourism and other industries. But due to the different statistics of the tourism scope, calculating the tourism value added is different, so it is difficult to compare.(4)Tourism investment contributes to the growth of GDP, but it is not the contribution of the tourism itself. If the tourism investment and tourism gross incomes are totaled as tourism’s contribution to GDP, it will lead to repeated calculation of GDP. (5) In general, the outbound tourism is not a part of the national or regional tourism industry. To meet the demand of national tourism and leisure, regarding it as a part of the tourism is more appropriate. (6) The complexity of the tourism industry cannot be used to explain the strong correlation with other industries. In a sense, tourism is simply made up of many industries, its industry correlation is just the weighted average of those industries correlation degree, and mainly depends on some activities which have closely related to tourism characteristic. Therefore, to compare the correlation degree of tourism industry with other industries can only live in a middle position, instead of living in the forefront of all industries. Tourism’s most important leading role of the national economy may not be input and output of economic ties, but enhancing the image of the region, optimizing the investment environment, improving the quality of the humanities and so on. The problem discussed in this paper is largely due to researcher’s imprecise use of the concept. From this point, the task of the discipline construction of tourism has still a long way to go.

Keywords: tourism industry; GDP; total tourism income; tourism value added