Spatial spillover effects of county-scale tourism economic growth in Zhejiang province

Abstract

Taking 65 county-scale units in Zhejiang Province as an example, the exploratory spatial data analysis and Spatial Durbin Model were comprehensively used in this study to demonstrate the spatial spillover effects of county- scale tourism economic growth and its influencing factors in 2004-2016. The results show that: 1) During the study period, the tourism economies of the 65 county- scale units showed a strong spatial agglomeration. The local spatial associations were mainly high- high and low- low agglomeration. High- high agglomeration areas were mainly located in the central urban areas, and low- low agglomeration areas were mainly located in western and southern Zhejiang Province. The spatial autocorrelation of tourism economic growth indicates that the existence of spatial effects cannot be ignored when examining its evolution path. 2) There is a significant spatial spillover effect in the counties' inbound and domestic tourism economic growth, and every 1% growth in local inbound and domestic tourism economy will drive the inbound and domestic tourism economy of neighboring counties to increase by 0.192% and 0.249%, respectively. The influencing factors of county- scale tourism economy in the province, such as economic development level, tourism resources endowments, tourism infrastructures, location and traffic conditions, and so on, all have significant spatial spillover effects. Overlooking the spatial effects of tourism economic growth will overestimate the strength of these factors. 3) There are significant differences in the strengths and impacts of various influencing factors of tourism economic growth. In the future, we should pay more attention to the spatial dependence characteristics of the growth in both inbound and domestic tourism economy, and make every effort to promote the economic growth of tourism in order to achieve the high-quality development of regional tourism industry.