Determinant of the tourism economy in Chinese cities: from an urban centrality perspective

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze and explain how urban centrality influences tourism development in a city. Based on the panel data of 295 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005 to 2018, the paper develops explanatory mechanisms and discusses the influence theoretically and empirically. To advance the analysis, this paper constructs a new index for urban centrality. Our empirical findings are as follows: (1) urban centrality promotes tourism income significantly. (2) Mechanism analysis illustrates that urban centrality fosters tourism through the agglomeration and industrial structure effects. (3) Heterogenous analysis suggests that the influence of urban centrality on tourism varies with city sizes and locations.