No abstract

Purpose Some researchers have found that disasters may have a “blessing in disguise effect” that some disaster sites transformed into more popular tourism destinations; however, no studies have analyzed the heterogeneity of the “blessing in disguise effect”. This paper aims to explore and determine the effect of cultural distance on international inbound tourist arrivals to a post-disaster tourist destination that could explain this heterogeneous phenomenon. Design/methodology/approach This study used a threshold regression model and a differences-in-differences (DID) approach to analyze 2000–2016 international tourist arrival data from 13 main origin countries to Sichuan Province before and after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake in China. Findings The effect of cultural distance on post-disaster inbound arrivals from the various origin countries followed a non-linear U-shaped “double-edged sword” pattern rather than displaying a simple linear relationship. Most notably, the disaster appeared to have a more positive effect on arrivals from countries with larger cultural distances, while the effect on arrivals from countries with shorter cultural distances was negative. Originality/value This study found that cultural distance could explain the heterogeneous “blessing in disguise” phenomenon, and it had both positive and negative impacts on tourism destination recovery; that is, a definite “double-edged sword effect” of cultural distance was found, which could help destination marketing organizations and management departments to design appropriately targeted marketing for post-disaster tourism destination recovery.

No abstract

Abstract:The carbon emissions from coal-fired power have become an increasing concern to governments around the world. In this paper, a carbon emissions allowances allocation based on the equilibrium strategy is proposed to mitigate coal-fired power generation carbon emissions, in which the authority is the lead decision maker and the coal-fired power plants are the follower decision makers, and an interactive solution approach is designed to achieve equilibrium. A real-world case study is then given to demonstrate the practicality and efficiency of this methodology. Sensitivity analyses under different constraint violation risk levels are also conducted to give authorities some insights into equilibrium strategies for different stakeholders and to identify the necessary tradeoffs between economic development and carbon emissions mitigation. It was found that the proposed method was able to mitigate coal-fired power generation carbon emissions significantly and encourage coal-fired power plants to improve their emissions performance.