Third International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

Study on environmental impacts of tourism industry has long been a research focus under the background of promoting a more sustainable tourism growth. However, empirical study on the impact of air pollution on tourism has been relatively limited, especially for developing countries where tourism has been growing rapidly due to economic growth and facing an increasingly challenging air pollution issue. China’s tourism industry has witnessed a steady growth largely due to the nation’s steady economic growth and opening-up policy ever since 1980s, and has continued its rapid growth pace despite of a slowing-down economic growth in the last few years. Meanwhile, a worsening environmental pollution, the heavy smog, has become a threatening issue for sustainable tourism growth in heavily polluted regions such as the capital city, Beijing. As some media have reported, the smog is “choking China’s inbound tourism and “creating a tide of smog refugees. But existing research has mainly focused on impact of air pollution on inbound tourism, while its impact on the domestic tourism has been relatively neglected. Taking Beijing as the study case, this paper assesses the interrelationship between air pollution and domestic tourist arrivals from 31 mainland Chinese provinces and municipal cites based on panel data analysis. For this purpose, a gravity model has been applied incorporating air quality variables into the tourism demand model. Results show evidence in favor of the existence of relationship between air pollution and tourism growth.