Analysis, Based On The Esp Paradigm Of China's Tourism Industry Performance

In the crucial era when Chinese tourism experiencing in the transformation and improvement, a higher level of performance is required to tourism industry, by either the objective of becoming the mainstay industry, or building a leading destination country. In order to do so, firstly we need objectively evaluate the actual performance of Chinese tourism industry during these 30 years, to identify the gap; then, the most important is, to find out the basic reason behind such performance, so as to improve effectively. Thus, under the current tourism statistic system in China, which cannot provide entire and scientific data on the performance of tourism industry, it is a valuable topic deserves deeply researches and discussions, to explore the rationale of critical performance indicators, and make more valid evaluation on tourism industry performance.The key process of analyzing the tourism performance in China is, to identify the main restrictions of behavior decision. Although the classical paradigm of SCP Analysis indeed has advantage in analyzing the relationship between monopolization and competition in different types of markets, and forecasting the various outcomes from different market behaviors, it can not reveal the determinants that form the market structure. Moreover, because of neglecting the ownership restrictions in Chinese economic transformation, this paradigm cannot explain the non-market behaviors of Chinese tourism entities. In this article, a paradigm of ESP has been proposed for analyzing tourism industry performance, which starts at the developmental environment of tourism industry, emphasizes the relation between ownership and market structure, and focuses on behaviors of tourism economic entities and its economic outcomes.In the analysis, restrictions of systems, including ownership, planning system, and financial system, are identified as the critical factors composing tourism developmental environment. Those three system restrictions have profound impacts on tourism industry ownership, market structure and its movement, which reveals the market variation of typical tourism industries in different periods, such as hotels, tourist attractions and travel agencies, and describes each transformation routes as well. In the stage of analyzing economic entities'behaviors, local governments and enterprises are involved in the same framework, to discuss the leading patterns of local governments in different development periods and their effects on market structure and tourism enterprises. In the last, under the interaction of ownership incentive, market structure restrictions, and local government behaviors, the equilibrium of enterprises'behaviors in various types of markets, determined by the performance, has been set up, and the cause of revenue and profit margin also have been explained separately.Three perspectives have been proposed through the theoretical analysis and practical examinations: 1. the ownership, planning system, and financial system are the main context of Chinese tourism industrial performance; 2. the competitions among different local governments in tourism investment are the primary driving force of tourism economy; 3. the conflicts between ownerships and market structures are critical determinants of the tourism profit rate.Based on the above, the conclusion on Chinese tourism performance has been reached: depending on financial performance indicators of tourism enterprises, the actual performance of Chinese tourism industry is better than what reflects in statistics, moreover, additional performance from industrial positive externality is also hardly presented in revenues and profitability; according to the measurement of entire economic efficiency, there are indeed distinctions between macro and micro performances, because of the inevitable cost of tourism market transformation under system restrictions -- firstly, the incentive mechanism of state ownership causes the distortion of market behaviors, and therefore results in productivity loss; secondly,government control and intervention generates the efficiency loss of resource allocation -- however, those costs of transformation, compared to the increase of tourism economy during 30 years in China, are relatively less.