Research On The Potential Of Tourism Industry In China

During the 30 years of our reform opening, tourism industry in China has been developing so fast and become the strategic pillars of national economy. With this great opportunity and challenge, we have to pay more and more attention to its competitiveness and sustainability in the future. Potential is the accumulative phase of the competitiveness and sustainability, thus, potential of tourism industry is the premise and base of its competitiveness and also the source and guarantee of its sustainability. As a result, this paper believe that, it does good to figure out what is the potential factor of tourism industry, exploit to the full its favorable conditions and avoid unfavorable ones according to the local conditions for forming the competitiveness and making sure the healthy, effective and sustainable development of this industry. Meanwhile, comparing with competitiveness and other related subjects, research on the potential of tourism industry is much weaker, therefore, it is very important to do qualitative research and quantitative research on this subject, on the macro level, it is beneficial to the government and other related managerial organizations to build practical policy and decisions; on the academic level, it is beneficial to the researches to obtain a set of researching vies and methodology for deep study in this field, which is the practical importance and value of this paper.Potential of tourism industry is the researching object of this paper, after the related literature review of the connotative definition of potentiality, the author believes that, potential is the accumulative phase of the competitiveness and sustainability, which is the beginning point to define this subject, namely potential of tourism industry is composed of the recessive components of this industry, which is also the accumulative phase as well as the source and guarantee of the dominant competitiveness and sustainability, then, this paper clarifies the relationship between this subject and related definitions.Firstly, the qualitative study on potential of tourism industry is based on economic theory. According the analysis of its definition above, we know that the components of potential of the industry is the important guarantee and related to the realization of the competitiveness of the industry. According to Industrial Economics, the operation of the industry depends on the accumulation and reaction of all its inner and outer components; in a similar way, the development of the industry depends on the growing up of the components. Thus, combining the theory of competitive economics, industrial economics and developing economics as well as the related literature review of the influencing factors of this researching subject, this pare clarifies the components of potential of tourism industry, which includes industrial structure, industrial assembly, creation capability, supply and demand on the market, system and policy, basic support and the industry and the environment guarantee of the industry. As a result, this paper builds the framework for the subject, namely the potential of tourism industry is composed of this system, potential of internal growth, potential of market extension and potential of sustainable development, and then, explains the influencing factors of potential tourism industry.Based on the qualitative research above and according to the characteristic of tourism industry-strong relevance with other industries and combining with the theoretic framework of the researching subject, this paper analyzes the characteristic of the system of tourism industry, which is dynamic, opening and undefined bindery, then clarifies the industrial scale of this study. Accordingly, this paper chooses 55 indexes on the basis of the Chinese statistics Yearbooks and other official statistics and selects 46 after expert consultation. After that, this paper reviews and analyzes the evaluating methodology, index system and models of the researching subject, refers to that of related field and finally builds the evaluation index system.The empirical study on potential of tourism industry is base on the evaluation index system above, this paper chooses 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government as researching aim, selects the data of year 2002-2007 of those regions and then after the data processing, it carries out the layered and comprehensive evaluation to their potential of tourism industry with metering methods of factor analysis, principal component analysis and cluster analysis. The result shows that support of system and policy, supply on the market, industrial scale, demand on the market, environmental guarantee, industrial assembly, creation capacity is the 7 main influencing factors of the researching subject. Meanwhile, this paper carries out the fitting test according the score of potential of every region, which proves that the potential of tourism industry is positive to improve the regional tourism economic growth and regional GDP. Cluster analysis shows the strengths and weaknesses of potential in every region, accordingly, this paper combines this result with three kinds of regional division in China, namely the division of east-middle-west, the division of 8 comprehensive economic regions and the division of three economic circles. The result shows that, at present, the distribution of potential of tourism industry in China is stronger in the east and weaker in the middle and the west, which is anastigmatic to the distribution of that of the 8 comprehensive economic regions. After that, this paper analyze the distribution mentioned above of the three economic circles, all of them locate in the east of China. The result shows that, at present, potential of tourism industry is the strongest in Pearl River Delta, which takes the second place in the Yangtze River delta and third in circum-Bohai region.Potential of tourism industry is composed of three systems, potential of internal growth, the potential of market extension and potential of sustainable development. Through the analysis to the influencing factors as well as their importance of every system, we can see that political environment gives the strongest support to the comprehensive potential; the supply capability of resource, industrial scale and potential of demand and consumption of the regional marked also plays key roles to the comprehensive potential; natural and ecological environment as well as the creation capability also takes effect to the comprehensive potential, but not that strong, which depends on the specific regional conditions. As a result, this paper analyze and concludes four paths to accumulate potential of tourism industry, namely driving force of political system, driving force of resource, driving force of demand on the marked and driving force of industrial scale. Accordingly and at last, this paper brings forward some suggestions in order to look into the status quo and characteristics of the potential of tourism industry in China and based on the reality to offer practical and effective reference for decision makers as well.The study of potential is a dynamic process, many researching points is of theoretical and practical meaning, such as deepening the research on its theoretical framework, dynamic evaluation and finding out the positive and effective way to accelerate the transformation from potential to competitiveness and sustainability. To those points mentioned above, the Author will pay more attention and try to improve in the subsequent studies...