Empirical Research About Kinmen Tourism Development

This thesis aims to explore how to increase tourism economy in Kinmen County,seeking to figure out why such a place in which have plentiful resources cannot develop a robust tourism.In this regard,existing advantages and disadvantages are inventoried in the introduction part.Based on this preliminary discussion,the author further argued that besides of Kinmen’s isolation,limited budget,lack of infrastructure,shortage of water resources,and high political risk,the fundamental barrier to tourism development is local government’s less capacity to transfer public services.It decreased,therefore,the investment willingness of corporations and attractions from tourists.Accordingly,in the research design part,mixed methods have been used to elaborate this assumption by constructing two statistic models and forming hypotheses,collecting information interviewed by local civil servants,bureaucrats,and business operators.The empirical results show that the degree of a tourist attraction,incentives,and quality of government’s services can significantly influence investment willingness.Moreover,the degree of a tourist attraction can be well explained by the quality of tourism,impressions of tourist destinations,and evaluations of local tourism industries.This finding is to some extent in line with the theoretical claims that improving local tourism depends heavily on how to motivate business owners.There is,however,very little known about its accomplishment.As the case reveals that even though the political polarization in Taiwan has been influencing the Cross-Strait relation,has little impact on Kinmen due to its isolation and financial autonomy.Whereas,a cognitive gap has been existed within local residents,governments,enterprises,and tourists,impeding Kinmen to develop a well-formed governance structure to lower political risk.An alternative to strengthen government’s capacity is to enlarge citizen participation within policy making process through which building channels of communication,converging multiple stakeholders,and creating a mechanism to share benefits justly with the local community.Specifically,the author suggests that the local government should launch a bunch of policies to improve tourism economy including making multiple policies,adopting steady investment policy,co-production with corporations,interlocking Kinmen and Xiamen,recruiting talents and seeking financial support from China.In conclusion,the author claims that this essay is very helpful to further research even though the limited internal validity resulted from the costs of time and budget.