International Standardization in Tourism Services

The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to the importance of international standardization in tourism services with a view to the elimination of barriers to free movement of tourism services and its importance for consumers: visitors in tourism, when the international standards encourage consumers responsibility, enforce their legitimate demands, expectations, safety, and security. This contribution also describes the basic guidelines to prevent the spread of coronavirus in the tourism industry. These measures will contribute to the recovery of the tourism sector and restore the confidence of the traveler. Furthermore, the measures emphasize the possibilities of greater acceptance of international standards for tourism services in the post-COVID-19 period. They will also contribute to faster renewal of individual sectors/tourism services. At the same time, they contribute to reopening and engaging individual destination/countries in international tourism.

Export market participation and environmental actions of enterprises in Vietnam

The outcome of environmental actions from participation in the export market are examined by unpacking some mechanisms that explain the estimated relationship. The empirical strategy utilizes the variation in the distance between the location of the sampled enterprises and the top 25 destinations of Vietnamese exports across sectors, and the weight of each sampled export to total exports in each period, to obtain exogenous variation in the enterprise's export market participation. The result shows a positive relationship between the enterprise's export participation and its overall engagement in environmental actions (such as the sum of its environmental actions, the sum of actions in the investments in equipment towards environmental issues, and total expenditure for the purchase of equipment for environmental actions). Possible mechanisms are international standardization, national certification, and strong enforcement of environmental regulations from export market engagement.