Efficiency Evaluation and Spatial Pattern of Regional Tourism Green Development in China

Abstract

Green development efficiency evaluation for tourism is an important basis for revealing the quality of regional tourism development in China. Based on the measurement of China's regional tourism carbon emissions and energy consumption from 2010 to 2019, this paper comprehensively uses the slack based model (SBM), exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and space-time transition methods to explore the green development efficiency and spatial correlation pattern of regional tourism in China. Our analysis suggests that China's regional tourism's green development efficiency are dropping with an average level of 0.632-0.739 from 2010 to 2019, and more than half of the provinces still concentrated in the medium and low efficiency levels due to their extensive development. There are great differences across its regions with the largest mean difference of 0.794 in tourism green development efficiency, and the four major regions of China shows a pattern of Northeast > Central > Western > Eastern. China's tourism green development efficiency shows a clear positive spatial association, but it diminishes over time, and the spatial variation among provinces has become greater. The green development efficiency of China's tourism has relatively stable spatial agglomeration, dominated by high-high aggregations and low-high aggregations. And its space-time transition type exhibits certain characteristics of spatial locking and path dependence, among which, provinces with transition type IV have the most.