Can Tourism Development Help Improve Urban Liveability? An Examination of the Chinese Case

Jianxiong Tang, Chaoyue Cai (), Yujing Liu () and Jiaxiang Sun
Additional contact information
Jianxiong Tang: College of Tourism, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410081, China
Chaoyue Cai: College of Tourism, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410081, China
Yujing Liu: College of Tourism, Hunan Normal University, Changsha 410081, China
Jiaxiang Sun: College of Political Science, University College London, London WC1E6BT, UK

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 18, 1-27

Abstract: The emergence of “urban diseases” has aroused people’s widespread concern about urban liveability. Therefore, it is worth studying whether tourism, as a “smokeless industry” can improve it. In this article, the benchmark model, the spatial Durbin model (SDM), and the panel threshold model (PTM) are constructed to test the impact of tourism development on urban liveability based on the data from 284 prefecture-level and above cities in China for the period 2004–2019. The results show that tourism development can significantly contribute to the improvement of urban liveability. Meanwhile, the positive impact of tourism development on the liveability of neighboring cities through spatial spillover effects is still valid in eastern, central, and western China, but the effect is much larger in the eastern and central cities than in the western cities. Moreover, tourism development has positive nonlinear effects on urban liveability, and the marginal effects are clearly decreasing after crossing the first and second thresholds. Finally, specific recommendations are proposed for tourism development to improve urban liveability.

Keywords: tourism development; urban liveability; spatial Durbin model; panel threshold model; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/18/11427/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/18/11427/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:18:p:11427-:d:912816

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().