Analysis on the Impact of Forest Park Facilities on the Performance of Forest Park Tourism: An Empirical Study of Forest Parks in China

ABSTRACT

Based on data from forest parks and cities on the macrolevel from 2010 to 2016, we built panel data and evaluated the performance of forest tourism according to the aspects of tourism revenue and number of tourists. With an individual and time fixed-effect panel model, we measure the impacts of four types of facilities on the development of forest tourism for the first time. The study shows that the number of vehicles does not significantly influence tourism revenue or number of tourists, but walkways and lodging facilities do, while catering facilities significantly influence the number of tourists but not tourism revenue. Meanwhile, the impacts of different facilities on forest tourism revenue and number of tourists differ across forest parks at different levels and in different regions as well as across individual parks at the national level.

KEYWORDS:

• Facility
• forest tourism
• forest park
• panel model
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Data from 2000’ Statistics of Chinese Tourism: https://wenku.baidu.com/view/97e4d012f18583d0496459d3.html, 2009’ Statistics of Chinese Tourism: http://zjzx.zje.net.cn/xbjs/show.aspx?id=981&cid=283, 2010’ Statistics of Chinese Tourism: https://wenku.baidu.com/view/2140e2bd2cc58bd63186bda7.html, and the 2017’ Tourism Market and Its Contribution to GDP Growth: http://zwgk.mct.gov.cn/auto255/201802/t20180206_832375.html?keywords=。

2 The comprehensive contribution of China's tourism industry to economy leads the world average: http://travel.china.com.cn/txt/2018-01/08/content_50202914.htm。

3 Data from 2010’ Statistics of Forest Parks under Construction and Management: http://zgslgy.forestry.gov.cn/slgy/2452/53512/1.html; and 2017’ Statistics of Forest Parks under Construction and Management:http://zgslgy.forestry.gov.cn/slgy/2452/20180418/1093102.html。

4 Data from 2010’ Statistics of Forest Parks under Construction and Management: http://zgslgy.forestry.gov.cn/slgy/2452/53512/1.html; and 2017’ Statistics of Forest Parks under Construction and Management: http://zgslgy.forestry.gov.cn/slgy/2452/20180418/1093102.html.

5 The forest park data include all data from the national and provincial parks and some data from county-level parks. Some parks are not open to the public because of maintenance, expansion or suspension of business and are therefore missing relevant data; those parks are not included in the econometric analysis because of the missing data.

6 Source: “Measures for the Administration of Forest Parks”, http://base.ftourcn.com/showfile.html?projectid=246&username=ftourzx&articleid=96436B56E11640269C32E86822F81C42.

7 Source: “Measures for the Administration of Forest Parks”, http://base.ftourcn.com/showfile.html?projectid=246&username=ftourzx&articleid=96436B56E11640269C32E86822F81C42.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by youth project funded by The National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71804013), “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2017ZY62)”, and “Science and Technology Innovation Program Project of Beijing Forestry University (No. JGZKPY004)”.