Chinese tourism economic change under carbon tax scenarios

ABSTRACT

Carbon tax is among the hot topics in the Chinese scientific community. This study mainly investigates the economic impacts of the carbon tax on Chinese tourism industry under two scenarios: a single carbon tax and a carbon tax plus compensation, using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model. The study examines the advancement of tourism economic change with respect to the output, employment, production price, and demand. Our main conclusions are that: (1) the impacts of carbon tax on different economic variables and different tourism sectors vary significantly, (2) the carbon tax has the greatest impacts on tourism demand, and has the smallest impacts on tourism production price, (3) a carbon tax with a compensation plan is conductive to improving the carbon tax performance, (4) the impacts of carbon tax decline in the long run. Our theoretical and practical proposals could highlight more effective practices to investigate the impacts of climate policies including carbon tax on the tourism economy in other territories.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic change
• low-carbon tourism
• low-carbon economy
• carbon tax
• carbon tax plus compensation
• computable general equilibrium modelling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jiekuan Zhang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0598-0584

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (71764027), and Nanhu Scholars Program for Young Scholars of Xinyang Normal University.