Study on Measurement of Green Productivity of Tourism in the Yangtze River Economic Zone, China

Gang Liu, Pengfei Shi, Feng Hai, Yi Zhang and Xingming Li
Additional contact information
Gang Liu: School of Economics and Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Pengfei Shi: School of Economics and Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Feng Hai: School of Economics and Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Yi Zhang: School of Economics and Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Xingming Li: School of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Central China Normal University, Wuhan 430079, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 8, 1-17

Abstract: This paper introduces energy consumption and carbon emission into the analysis framework of the green productivity of tourism. By comparing and analyzing the two main methods used to evaluate the energy consumption and carbon emission estimations of tourism, namely, the “top-down” and “bottom-up” method, and considering the availability of data, the “bottom-up” method was adopted to evaluate the energy consumption and carbon emissions of tourism in the Yangtze River Economic Zone (YREZ). Then, using the Malmquist-Luenberger (ML) index in the super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) model, the green productivity of the tourism in 11 provinces and cities in the YREZ from 2006 to 2015 was measured. The empirical results show that: (1) The energy consumption and carbon emissions of tourism in the YREZ have increased steadily over the past 10 years, which has caused a certain degree of pollution to the environment, indicating that tourism is no longer a “smoke-free industry”; (2) there are significant provincial differences between the energy consumption and carbon emissions of tourism in the YREZ, with Shanghai always ranking first, while Guizhou and Yunnan ranks last, which represents that the tourism economic development level is positively correlated with the tourism energy consumption and carbon emissions; (3) the green productivity of tourism in the YREZ shows a fluctuating increasing trend in the past 10 years, and technological progress has become the main reason for its growth in green productivity; and (4) the green productivity of tourism in 11 provinces and cities in the YREZ can be divided into three types: Progressive type of tourism green development, stagnant type of tourism green development, and declining type of tourism green development. Consequently, different types of provinces should explore effective dependency paths based on their own conditions.

Keywords: tourism; green productivity; measurement; Yangtze River Economic Zone (YREZ) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/8/2786/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/8/2786/ (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:10:y:2018:i:8:p:2786-:d:162284

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 ().