Research On The Domestic Tourism Consumption Theories

Ever since the reform and opening-up began in 1978, the Chinese economy has been developing at a high rate for more than 30 years. However, the economy also shows the structural imbalance of favouring investment over consumption, favouring overseas market demands over domestic market demands. Therefore, the Chinese government put forward a new development strategy of the following goals: maintaining the progress, expanding the domestic demands, adjusting the economy structure, accelerating the reform and opening-up, and benefiting the people, clarifying that the tourism industry has been positioned by government as the "strategic industry" in China. In 2009, set up the core position of domestic tourism in the entire tourism industry. At the same time, the Chinese domestic tourism is confronting a series of key questions:Are the driving forces for the Chinese urban domestic market the same as those for the Chinese rural domestic market? Is the domestic tourism market a "buyers'market" or a "sellers'market"? How effective is the reform and opening-up policy in terms of its function to the development of domestic tourism? What are the relations between domestic tourism and macroeconomic factors? This article follows a way of finding the problems, analysing the problems then solving the problems. There are three methodologies in this article, including an interdisciplinary approach, induction and deduction and empirical analysis, which enable the presentation of the study in both a qualitative and a quantitative way.First of all, the following concepts are examined:the domestic tourism, the domestic tourism demands, and the domestic tourism consumption. This would suggest that actualised tourism demand is, in fact, tourism consumption. Tourism consumption reflects the healthiness between tourism demands and supplies. Then the competitive relations among domestic, outbound and inbound tourism are discussed, which indicates that the domestic tourism and inbound tourism compete for the same tourism resources among different consumers, and the domestic tourism and outbound tourism compete for the same consumers among different tourism resources. After reviewing the Chinese and overseas literatures, it is argued that tourism demand modeling should not be only based on demand theory but also on consumption theory. At the same time, there is a special situation of domestic tourism where destination coincides with origin. Hence, the O-D model may not be suitable for domestic tourism research, and a new theoretical framework is required.To build up the domestic tourism consumption theory based on consumption theory, different schools of consumption theories are discussed, and the Keynes models is chosen with two extra factors called "liquidity constraints" and "uncertainty." A new framework is built up with the Individuals, Supplies, Macro environment and Events, (ISME), which are chosen by applying the Stakeholder Analysis to the domestic tourism market. These various factors derived from the literature review are generalized into the new framework, forming the domestic consumption conceptual model----SME model.The ultimate purpose of the build-up of the domestic consumption theory is for empirical research, whose basis is a multidirectional analysis on the Chinese domestic tourism market. Firstly, the history and the features of the market are described. Then, it is argued that the deeper factor behind the market features is the change of the tourism industry regime. It is shown that general adoption of the market principles is the main character in tourism industry transition, and the regime reform has made an extreme impact on demand and supply relations in the domestic tourism market. Finally, in applying the ISME model to the domestic market, the market build-up mechanism is analysed and some basic hypotheses are put forward for the empirical research.During the stage of this empirical research, the proposed model and related methods are examined and dependent variables are defined. The sample data are the secondary data derived from the most authoritative official publications to guarantee the credibility of the data and the results. The SPSS 11.5 statistical software is utilized to conduct a correlation and a multiple regressions analysis, which verifies the theoretical hypotheses that result in an urban domestic tourism consumption model and a rural domestic tourism model. Finally, the results are discussed and analysed, and further research is presented for nine hypotheses which were not verified at the first test. After examining more data, the relations between the dependent and independent factors are revealed based on the ISME model. The questions raised at the beginning are answered. First, the driving forces for the Chinese urban domestic market are shown to be not the same as those for the Chinese rural domestic market. The driving forces for the urban market are the income capacity, the price of the tourism products, the quality of the tourism products, uncertainty, and any unexpected events. The driving forces for the rural market are mainly the willingness of the consumers and the price of the tourism products. Second, the domestic tourism market is still a "sellers'market," indicating a potential to a further growth in domestic tourism market. Third, the reform and opening-up policy is extremely effective in terms of its function on the development of domestic tourism. It implies that providing high-quality and innovative products are not only the prerequisites for supplies'growth, they are also the material foundation for the healthy development of domestic tourism. Fourth, the macroeconomic environment formulated by the government is closely related to domestic tourism growth. This strongly suggests that strategies to develop the social security system will influence the sustainable growth of the domestic tourism market.The chosen topic of the study appears practical and suitable for the current economics situation. On the basis of the previous research, the article analyses and develops the conceptions of tourism consumption, attempting to build up domestic tourism consumption ISME model through an interdisciplinary approach. Then the model is utilized to analyse the Chinese domestic tourism market, finding the different driving forces for the urban and rural markets. The resulting data are utilised to clarify the mechanism of domestic tourism consumption through the perspective of the comparison between demands and supplies and the joint forces of macro economy environment.The research is certainly open to further analysis and discussion, such as the turning point study of the domestic tourism consumption and the income gap, the competitive relations study between the domestic and the outbound tourism, and the seasonal demand study of the domestic tourism.