Does Pandemic Fatigue Prevent Farmers’ Participation in the Rural Tourism Industry: A Comparative Study between Two Chinese Villages

Mengyuan Qiu (), Yueli Ni and Sulistyo Utomo
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Mengyuan Qiu: College of Economics and Management, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing 210037, China
Yueli Ni: Nanjing Institute of Tourism and Hospitality, Nanjing 211100, China
Sulistyo Utomo: Griffith Business School, Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus, Gold Coast, QLD 4222, Australia

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 20, issue 1, 1-17

Abstract: Rural tourism is an important income generation method for farmers post-pandemic. However, few studies have focused on how pandemic fatigue has affected their willingness to participate in rural tourism development. We conducted a quasi-experiment to test these effects using data from two Chinese villages. Shanlian village, which was more severely affected by COVID-19, was the experimental group, while Huashu village was set as the control group. Our results reveal that both physical and mental fatigue hinder farmers’ intention to engage in rural tourism. Further, there were significant interaction effects between physical and mental fatigue on the farmers’ participation in rural tourism. For farmers with low physical fatigue, the higher their mental fatigue, the less willing they were to participate in rural development. Conversely, for the higher physical fatigue group, farmers with low levels of mental fatigue were still more willing to participate in rural tourism development. These findings reduce the current research gap concerning the relationship between pandemic fatigue and farmers’ participation in rural tourism and indicate that practitioners and policymakers should consider farmers’ fatigue management as an important factor for the sustainability of rural tourism during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

Keywords: physical fatigue; mental fatigue; rural tourism participation; Chinese villages; COVID-19 pandemic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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