Research On The Influence Of Regional Tourism Development On Economic Growth And Its Convergence

Tourism industry is regarded as making contribution to the growth of national economy by earning foreign exchange,creating employment opportunities,attracting social investment,bringing related industries,narrowing the wealth gap and so on for a long time.Therefore,the 12th Five-year plan included fully integrating tourism industry into the national strategy system,and promoting it to strategic pillar industry of the national economy.And the 13th Five-year plan continued to emphasize the importance of fostering tourism industry into an important driver of economic transformation and upgrading.However,domestic and foreign scholars' researches on whether tourism development can accelerate economic growth and its convergence or not obtained lots of different conclusions.This thesis takes Bohai economic rim's 17 cities' domestic tourism income,inbound tourism income,per capita GDP and some related variable indicators from 2001 to 2015 as the research object.Based on summarizing the existing literature results and relevant theories,constructing the fixed effect panel data model to explore the impact direction and extent of domestic and inbound tourism development on economic growth by applying the multivariate econometric methods.Exploring Bohai region and its sub-regions' differences variation trend and the influence of tourism development on economic growth convergence by calculating related indicators and constructing the convergence test models then.The research findings are as follows:We find that the domestic tourism development in Bohai economic rim has a significant positive effect on economic growth,and it is a one-way Granger reason of economic growth.While the positive effect of inbound tourism development on economic growth is not significant.The differences of the economic growth tends to be reduced in Bohai region and three sub-regions.Besides,the disparity of economic growth within those three sub-regions are larger than the disparity between the regions.? convergence,? absolute convergence and ? conditional convergence are exist in Bohai economic Rim.But the addition of tourism development variable leads to a decline of the economic convergence coefficient's absolute value,which means tourism development restrains economic growth convergence in general.In addition,domestic tourism development leads to a decline in economic growth rate,while inbound tourism development can promote economic growth rate,but the former one has much significant effect degree.This thesis has made several contributions:first of all,the research narrows the study scale to concentrate in analyzing 17 prefecture level cities,enriches the research results of related filed in middle or small scale.Second,the research segments tourism development variable into domestic and inbound tourism,and explores the further influence of tourism development on economic growth rate and economic growth convergence on the basis of explores the impact of tourism development on economic growth,makes the research results more comprehensive.Finally,according to the empirical analysis results and the current development situation of Bohai region,this thesis puts forward several targeted regional tourism development policy suggestions,includes:Increasing the invest of tourism industry,promoting the development of domestic tourism,adjusting the structure of tourism industry,enhancing the regional cooperation mechanism,and supporting the development of backward area.