The DEA-based Tourism Efficiency Evaluation And Optimization In National Forest Parksin Hunan Province

Withthe ecotourism heating up year by year, the forest park as the main undertaker for ecotourism also obtained rapid development. As a big province in forestry, Hunan Province also own the first National Forest Park(the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park) and has been holding the pole position in national forest park construction. By the end of 2013, the total number of forest park in Hunan reached to 119, covering an area of 441862.03 hectares and accounting for more than 2% of land area in Hunan province. In the year of 2013, a total of 35.255 million visitors were entertained in the forest parks of Hunan, accounting for 10% of tourists in the whole Hunan Province and generated a profit of 4.2574748 billion Yuan, accounting for 1.6% of the provincial tourism income. Under this circumstance, the tourism efficiency of forest park got more and more attention of public. But as a matter of fact, the present study on it is relevantly less, leaving a large space for the development of forest park industry in Hunan Province.In this paper, the CCR model and BBC model in DEA were applied to measure the tourism efficiency of 51 national forest parks; after that, a Malmquist Index Model was applied to analyze on the tourism efficiency of national forest parks from 2009 to 2013. The main conclusion of this paper were as follows:(1) In 2013,31 of the 51 national forest parks in Hunan Province is synthetically efficient. And among the 16 parks not synthetically efficient,13 forest parks were not efficient in both scale and pure technique, and 3 forest park were not efficient just in scale. Moreover, the tourism scale efficiency of the first 13 parks was in the ascending stage, and the tourism scale efficiency of the latter 3 was in the declining stage.(2) From the perspective of reducing investment, the investment of the 3 forest parks whose tourism scale efficiency were in the declining stage should be reduced appropriately, such as the park area, annual investment and hardware facilities. And from the angle of increasing output, the output of the 13 foerest parks whose tourism scale efficiency were in the ascending stage were not up to the standard, such as the annual revenues, annual tourists, et cal.(3) From 2009 to 2013, the 12 of 14 cities and states in Hunan Province were efficient in the overall development, pure technique and scale. Among he remaining ones, Zhuzhou City was not pure technically efficient, leading to the comprehensive inefficiency; and the Yongzhou City was not synthetically efficient because of its inefficiency in the scale.(4) In terms of the technical progress index,12 of 14 cities and states in Hunan Province were in the stage of technical progress; the technical progress indexes of the remaining two including Changde City and Xiangxi State were less than 1, meaning a stage of technology retrogression. The technical progress index from 2010 to 2011 was 2.247, pointing to a stage of technical progress; indexes of the left years were less than 1, referring to a stage of technology retrogression.(5) 10 of 14 cities and states including Loudi City and Hengyang City, et cal. Were with high efficiency and high productivity; Zhuzhou City and Yongzhou City were with low efficiency but high potential; and with both low efficiency and low productivity, Changde City and Xiangtan City were in urgent need of improvement.