Coronavirus: Covid-19 a game changer for global ‘people supply chain’ of students, tourists
- The spread of the coronavirus will impact the global movement of tourists and students, with already strained links between China and the US set to be tested further
- Tourism will be hit more rapidly but is set to recover faster after the end of outbreak, but the damage to the movement of students may be longer lasting
This is part of a four-part series looking at how the coronavirus epidemic affects China’s relationships with the rest of the world. Part four focuses on how the virus is affecting the tourism and education industries due to various travel bans and restrictions.
At the time there were only 41 cases reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan, while the first case outside mainland China had been reported a day earlier in Thailand.
The research paper published by the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) downplayed fears of a decoupling of the “most basic and important” US-China link, human interactions and people-to-people exchanges, saying any concerns “seem exaggerated”.
I think the outbreak does have the potential of being a general decoupler. And this could have the potential of starting a deglobalisation event
Even the slowdown in the growth in the number of Chinese students going to the United States was not enough to warrant a confirmation of a “decoupling”, the research by Tianlei Huang and Jacob Funk Kirkegaard said.
But less than two months later, with the figure for China having exceeded 80,000 with over 3,000 deaths and the number of cases in some 100 places around the world more than 100,000, the authors have taken a different view.