The impact of national tourism day festivals on inbound tourism: A spatial difference-in-differences approach

Abstract

A comprehensive and accurate assessment of the policy effect of national tourism days is of great significance to further promote urban inbound tourism. Based on the panel data of 59 cities in China from 2000 to 2017, this paper evaluates the local and spatial spillover effects of the China Tourism Day policy on urban inbound tourism using a spatial difference-in-differences model based on the establishment of the China Tourism Day as a quasi-natural experiment. The study found that the China Tourism Day policy significantly increased the number of foreign tourists in cities but significantly reduced their average length of stay, with a positive spatial spillover effect on inbound tourism in surrounding cities.

Does the Visa-Free Policy Promote Inbound Tourism? Evidence From China

“…However, this assumption no longer holds when spatial spillover effects exist among different spatial units (Jia et al, 2021). SDiD can effectively compensate for the deficiencies of DiD, accommodate spatial spillover effects, and avoid biased estimates (Gu, 2023b(Gu, , 2023c. Since the 72-hr visa-free transit policy was implemented sequentially, the experimental group could distinguish between pre-and post-events, whereas the control group could not.…”

“…The time period of similar previous studies was from 2000 to 2015 (Gao et al, 2019; Gao & Su, 2019, 2021). Referring to Gu (2023c), the data from 2000 to 2017 were chosen because 2000 was the beginning of the new millennium, while 2017 was the last year the Chinese government disclosed the relevant data. The “China Tourism Statistical Yearbook” announced the number of inbound tourists and the average length of stay in 59 cities at the prefecture level and above, which means that they are provincial capital cities or prefecture level cities.…”

Official Turnovers and Economic Growth: Evidence from China

“…Neighboring cities are often not independent of each other in terms of economic and social development, and have strategic interactions (Gu, 2023c;Shi, 2020). A city's economic and social development often affects the development of neighboring cities, which is termed as the spatial spillover effect (Gu, 2024;Li et al, 2022). Empirical evidence suggests that this spatial spillover effect occurs in cities within the same province (Wu et al, 2021;Yu et al, 2016).…”