Spatial spillover effects and tourism-led growth: an analysis of prefecture-level cities in China

ABSTRACT

The current study uses a sample of 283 prefecture-level administrative units, between 2004 and 2015 in China, to study the spatial spillover effects of tourism development on urban economic performance. Positive direct effects of tourism on urban economy are found for the full data set, while the indirect effects are observed dependent on area coverage. Although the analysis of 283 units (full sample) indicates no significant tourism spatial spillover effect, the subsampling statistics reveals the contrary. Substantial spatial competitive inhibition effects emerge in the analysis of within-region subsample, and significantly positive spatial spillover effects are observed in the cross-region subsample.

KEYWORDS:

• Prefecture-level data
• spatial spillover
• tourism development
• tourism-led growth
• direct/indirect effects
• inhibition effects
• core-periphery structures
• agglomeration
• spatial Durbin model
• spatial differentiation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yanqiao Zheng http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6761-4942

Notes

1 The detailed data can be found from http://www.chyxx.com/industry/201512/367391.html, http://www.cnta.gov.cn/zwgk/lysj/201610/t20161018_786774.shtml and http://www.cnta.gov.cn/xxfb/jdxwnew2/201605/t20160529_772504.shtml.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Planning Office of Humanities and Social Science China [grant number 13CMZ038] and Guangxi first-class discipline construction (cultivation) project [grant number 201812].