关键词: 旅游业, 三大行业, 效率, 时空差异

Abstract:

Tourist attraction, travel agency and hotel are the three mainstays of the tourism industry. It is generally acknowledged that there should be a strong correlation between the three mainstays of tourism industry and a balanced, complementary relationship will benefit the overall development of regional tourism industry since every trip will inevitably involves the six elements which includes sightseeing, shopping, entertainment, food, accommodation and transportation. By using DEA model and ArcGIS spatial analysis model, this paper analyzes the spatial and temporal differentiation of efficiency of the three mainstays of tourism industry in 2002-2013. The results can be obtained as follows: 1) Tourist attraction industry has the lowest efficiency in the three mainstays, both in comprehensive efficiency, pure technological efficiency and scale efficiency. It shows that the input and output return of the Chinese tourist attraction industry is not stable and there is a certain investment risk on it. This is due to the large land area and higher initial infrastructure investment of tourist attraction. Therefore, more attention should be paid to avoid investment risks, and more effective benefit analysis should be done in the early stage of investment. 2) The spatial and temporal differentiation in the scale efficiency of the three mainstays is smaller than other two pieces of efficiency. This explains that the pure efficiency is still the dominant factor of the differentiation to comprehensive efficiency up to present. The benefits brought by technological innovation are still far smaller than the benefits of scale agglomeration. However, due to the decline in the scale efficiency in recent years, the technology innovation and application represented by information technology is very important to the future development of China’s tourism industry. 3) The spatial distribution of efficiency is different between east and west regions which shows that east regions are more efficient than west regions. The distribution of the standard deviation ellipse and the center of gravity are in favor of the eastern region, but differences between the three mainstays exists. The spatial pattern of attraction industry efficiency is influenced by the tourism resources and transportation factors. Its direction changes from northeast-southwest to the east-west, and further changes to the weak pattern of northwest-southeast direction. The spatial pattern of the hotel industry changes less because of its high stability. Affected by the overall economic and tourism industry development in the Midwest, the gap of hotel industry efficiency between west, middle and east is narrowing. Evolution of spatial pattern in travel agency industry efficiency shows the opposite trend. Middle and western regions are affected greatly by the changes in the demand for e-commerce and tourist demand compared with east part. The efficiency of travel agency industry has been impacted substantially and the gap is expanding between the three regions.

Key words: tourism industry, three mainstays of tourism industry, efficiency, spatial and temporal differentiation