Study On Determinants Of Chinese Inbound Tourism Demand Based On Panel Data Model

Inbound tourism as an important part of our country's three tourism markets which refers to domestic tourism, inbound tourism and outbound tourism has made a great contribution to our country's image advertising, exchange revenue, economic construction and so on. Thirty years since reform and opening up, our nation's inbound tourism industry enjoyed a great development, with a continually increasing number of foreign travelers, as well as revenues generated from inbound tourism. Our country will become the world's biggest tourism destination by the year 2020 according to the prediction of world tourism organization. However, in recent six years, compared with domestic tourism and outbound tourism, the development of the inbound tourism remains relatively slow, with only 7.81 percent market share, showing a tend of decrease annually. In addition, the tourist markets of our inbound tourism are mainly travelers from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, accounting for more than 80 percent market share, and our tourist markets of other countries account for a small part of the market share. The market share of our foreign tourist markets has been decreased for two yeas due to the impact of the global financial crisis broken out in 2008. So it is very necessary for us to analysis the current situation of our nation's inbound tourism, as well as the factors which brought a great influence to the inbound tourism. Therefore, the study about inbound tourism this paper focused on can be helpful in bringing out the potential of expanding inbound tourism market, in particular, the foreign tourist market, promoting the standard and level of inbound tourism as a tertiary industry, as well as promoting our nation's position and prestige in the international tourism market.Based on a systematical review of researches on inbound tourism influencing factors at home and abroad, this paper precisely defines some related concepts of inbound tourism, and anatomizes the current situation of our country's inbound tourism market in recent years. Then, according to the classic demand theory and particularity of international tourism, the paper qualitatively analyzes the primary factors influencing our country's inbound tourism demand under the potential assumptions given by tourist preference and free time, and builds up an inbound tourism demand model with a combination of double-log linear regression model and panel data model. Next, the paper selects latest tourism statistics of thirteen foreign guest countries of our nation from 1990 to 2010, and conducts empirical research, which draws the conclusion about the main factors influencing our nation's inbound tourism demand and tourism demand elasticity. The results show that the most important inbound tourism demand influencing factor is the income levels of the guest countries. Additionally, price of the substitute tourism destinations, exchange rate and tourism price in our nation also play significant roles in determining the demand for inbound tourism respectively, but the scope of their influence weakens in turn. Besides, it is interesting to find that the tourism price in our nation shows strong and positive effect on inbound tourism demand. Moreover, special events such as economics, politics and culture related all have serious impact on the inbound tourism demand. Finally, according to the analysis results of demand elasticity and descriptions of current situation of our nation's inbound tourism market, the paper addresses on the issues associated with tourism management policy-making.