The Suggestions On The Improvement Of Tourism Legislation Influenced By WTO (GATS)

In order to eliminate the trade barriers in services and improve the development of the trade in services, developing countries and developed countries reached a compromise and concluded The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). After many years' negotiation, China became a member of WTO and submitted the final "Schedule of Specific Commitment on Services". In the sector of "Tourism and Travel related Services", it only deals with hotels, restaurants, and tourism agency. The paper starts from GATS, the promise and memo by China's government on the problem of national treatment and market entrance of tourism service. On the basis of that, the situation of the tourism legal environment at present is comprehensively analyzed and so are the problems on tourism legislation. At the same time, referring to the relative law and advanced experience of the United States, the Europe and Japanese, I put forward the suggestions on the improvement of tourism legislation, that is, to constitute the basic law of tourism.After entering WTO, we are obliged to comply by laws and international conventions. That's to say, the principle of non-discrimination, free-trade and transparency of GATS, and also the schedule of specific commitment should be affirmed by the domestic law, or old articles are amended to meet the unification of the law system. However, on the basis of analyzing what we perform for commitment after entering WTO, there are still many problems in the tourism legislation, such as incomplete legal system, especially being lack of a basic law of the tourism, and outdated articles. Comparatively, developed countries are managing a mature tourism industry and complete tourism legislation. By analyzing and learning their advanced legislation mode and also the contents, we are clear that constituting a basic law of tourism is the right way to improve our tourism legislation.The fact is that by now those research which studies China's tourism far lagged behind the development of China's tourism. This paper attempts to probe into this issue to make our research outcome endowed with more practical values.