Measuring Tourism Spillover Effects Among Cities And GIS Implementation

Spillover, as an important concept in New Economic Growth Theory, is an externality which arises when a person engages in an activity that influences the well-being of a bystander and yet neither pays nor receives any compensation for that effect. In an open economic system, tourism spillovers (positive or negative) exist widely among cities, which is a key factor for regional tourism cooperation or competition. In this paper how to measure tourism spillovers among cities was discussed in qualitative and quantitative two ways, and then the tourism spillovers measurement system was built which could display the measurement results visually.Firstly, the relationships between tourism spillovers and regional tourism development were analyzed in the paper, and tourism spillovers as internal driving force of regional tourism cooperation was pointed out. Therefore, the quantitative measurement of tourism spillovers among cities could theoretically provide a scientific basis for the judgment of the effectiveness of regional tourism cooperation. Furthermore, two ways on the study of tourism spillovers were summed up: qualitative measurement by spatial autocorrelation and quantitative measurement by building the model.Secondly, the relevant theories of spatial autocorrelation were reviewed in detail, including the definition of spatial weight matrix, the calculation of global and local autocorrelation coefficient and its significance test. In the third chapter, based on the gap model proposed by Li and Wang (2009a) to measure tourism spillovers among cities was improved by considering five aspects such as the tourism (product) type-gap, the tourism (product) grade-gap and the geographical distance between two cities, the learning ability of the city which receives the spillovers and the tourism (industry) scale of the one which generates the spillovers. On the basis of the theoretical analysis of the second and third chapters, the tourism spillovers measurement system was designed by using AE component and C# language, in which spillovers measurement and spatial autocorrelation analysis were the two core function modules, which were used for respectively measuring tourism spillovers among cities qualitatively and quantitatively. Finally, the inter-city spillovers of Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and Shandong Peninsula were calculated through the above system, and some useful results were found.