A Demographic Approach to Evaluate the Development of Tourism Industry of Mainland China

Abstract

As the tourism industry shows a noticeable impact on the social and economic environment in China, it is essential to study how this industry has influenced the country. This paper discusses the relationship between some of the features of demographics and the development of tourism in China in recent years to evaluate the development of tourism in China. A province-level panel dataset is constructed from the related statistical yearbook to be applied to a pooled, fixed effect and random effect model respectively to check the correlation between the demographics features and development of tourism. As the result shows, the fast development of tourism has a highly positive correlation with urbanization process in China. However, the rapid growth in tourism seems to be negatively correlated with local total fertility rates. And to the side of mortality rate, the rise of tourism sometimes even has a significant adverse effect, which means the development of the tourism industry will have the impact for increasing mortality of that province. Those exciting results show that the tourism development in mainland China in the past few years, especially after the global financial crisis in 2008, could be quite challenging to the sustainable development of the Chinese economy. The economic structure of the industry of tourism in China still needs to be improved to achieve a better goal to benefit the nation with a long-term goal.