Synthetic Assessing Model for the Analysis of Spatial Disparity of Tourism Development in China
The spatial disparity of tourism development is one of the major issues in the study of regional tourism development.As defined by geographical location,tourist resources,social and historical culture,economic growth,traffic condition,fundamental infrastructure,and so on,the development of the tourist industry in China has manifested a great regional disparity,on which many studies have been carried out during the past decade.The review of the previous studies,however,suggests that there exist at least two deficiencies in the correlated studies.Firstly,there is little attention has been paid to the difference of population numbers and areas by the regional comparison of tourism development.Secondly,the indicators used to express the regional difference in tourism development are usually the single factors,such as tourist arrivals or tourist receipts.As the population numbers and areas in 31 provincial level districts in China are very different,and the tourism is a very complex socio-economic phenomenon,it is necessary to find out some relative factors that can really reflect the tourism development,with which the regional disparity of tourism development can be synthetically assessed. Through the analysis of the relative factors concerning the tourist receipts,tourist arrivals,tourist traffic,as well as tourist infrastructure,4 indicators such as average tourist receipts per resident,tourist density,road net density,as well as tourist bed density were selected and calculated in this paper for establishing a synthetic model,with which the regional disparities of tourism development in China have been analyzed. The assessing results indicate that,of the 31 provincial level districts in China,the developing degree of tourist industry has generally decreased from coastal areas to the inland,and from South East to North West,this is consistent with the trend of Chinese opening pace that expands gradually from the coastal to the inland districts,and conforms to the objective laws of economic development as well.The most developed districts in tourism locate mainly in eastern coastal areas,including the municipalities Beijing,Shanghai and Tianjin,as well as provinces Zhejiang,Jiangsu and Liaoning.The districts Chongqing,Shandong,Fujian,Guangdong and Hainan take second place in tourism development.They occupy also the location in coastal areas except Chongqing City.The tourist development in the northern and western parts of China,including Jilin,Heilongjiang,Neimenggu,Gansu,Ningxia,Qinghai,Xinjiang and Xizang districts,is the weakest in China.The rest districts,concentrate principally on middle and southeastern parts of China,show middle and relatively weak development in tourism. The research demonstrates also that the most developed districts of tourist industry in China are traditional great cities such as Beijing,Shanghai and Tianjin,this conclusion is obviously different from that of the previous studies,which suggested that the Guangdong Province has ranked the first place in tourism development in China.