Evaluation On Efficiency And Total Factors Productivity Of Chinese Primary Tourism Cities: 1995-2005

Tourism is one of the important components of the city functions. With the improvement of Chinese urbanization level, the resident's tourism demand has grown more and more. It is clear that the development of tourism has become an important approach to the economic development of cities. With the development of tourism industry, the competitions between urban tourism and the investments of city governments on tourism industry have been enhanced markedly. The purpose of this study here mainly is to evaluate the performance (including efficiency and total factor productivity, TFP) of resources usage in different urban tourism development and analyze its influencing factors from the spatio-temporal perspective. Based on the judgment of urban tourism developing process and the summaries of its developing characteristics, the research progress of "Urban tourism" and "Tourism efficiency & Tourism productivity" at home and abroad are analyzed, considering the Lopsided Development Law of Regional Economy, Ultra-PropertyRights Theory and External Economic Theory, three hypotheses about this study are proposed:(1) Higher tourism efficiency can more likely be achieved by the cities in Eastern developed regions for the larger scale of their resources input.(2) The improvement of efficiency and total factors productivity of urban tourism can be obtained with a competitive market environment.(3) The improvement of efficiency and total factors productivity of urban tourism can be obtained with a cooperative market environment. Then, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and its models, such as CRS,VRS,NIRS and Malmquist Index, often used in Economics for efficiency and productivity estimation, are used in this paper. Taking 58 Chinese primary tourism cities as Decision Making Units (DMU), the number of employees in tertiary industry, urban fixed-asset investments, attractive capability of cities and foreign capitals used in urban constructions as inputs indicators and operating income of star hotels as outputs indicators, the tourism efficiency and total factor productivity are evaluated at three time points during 1995-2005.The results of urban tourism efficiency evaluation show that the efficiency of most Chinese urban tourism are in a relatively low level with a stage of increasing returns to scale and a higher efficiency could be achieved through increasing the scale of their resources inputs. Among the decompositions, the scale efficiency is low, but the technical efficiency and congestion efficiency are relative high. At the same time, the scale efficiency has the greatest impact on the overall efficiency. Based on the analysis at the same period, there exists a hierarchical structure that the cities in eastern region have higher urban tourism efficiency than the cities in middle, western and north-east regions. But the decompositions of overall efficiency are different in their distribution. Among them; the difference of scale efficiency is obvious, but the difference of technical efficiency and congestion efficiency are obscure. The inner comparison of tourism efficiency decompositions in different years shows the characteristic that the gap between decompositions is becoming narrow gradually. That is, with the time changes, the difference among scale efficiency, technical efficiency and congestion efficiency of the same period are becoming more and more diminishingThe results of the total factors productivity evaluation of urban tourism show that the total factors productivity has achieved a growth in most of Chinese tourism cities during the year 1995-2005, but the growth rate are slowing down. What's more, there is a great difference in different city tourism total factor productivity progress levels, the cities in developed region always achieve the lower total factors productivity than the other regions.The case study in Zhuhai shows that the characteristics of its tourism development are similar with the statistical study. Through clustering with other cities in the same area, Zhuhai city often participates in the cooperation and competition with other cities, from which, Zhuhai city achieve high attractions and improve its total factors productivity.Based on theoretical analysis and case studies, aiming at the above hypotheses, three conclusions can be draw as followed:Conclusion 1: Influenced by the uneven characteristic of urban economic development, more resources can be input in the Eastern region during their tourism development. Under the background that most Chinese urban tourism are in the stage of their increasing returns to scale, cities in these regions are more likely to achieve higher tourism efficiency.Conclusion 2: Under a competitive market environment, in order to get higher profits, cities stimulate the council to increase tourism income through effective market competition, through which the cities who can get higher outputs with lower inputs always can be screened out as well as the ones with higher inputs and lower outputs. Such a process gives a high"political"pressure on the councils, which constantly promote them to improve their capability to use resources.Conclusion 3: Under the cooperative market environment, the urban tourism development often can make the tourists achieve their satisfaction maximization and reduce their cost through enhancing the exterior economy. Furthermore, this kind of relation also can influence the tourists'decision-making. So, the urban tourism under a cooperative market environment often can obtain a higher efficiency through the exterior economy in the same condition.The academic innovations of this paper can be summarized as followed:Innovation 1: The mechanism of Chinese urban tourism efficiency and total factors productivity are analyzed combining management science, economic competition theory and ultra-property right theory.Innovation 2: Considering the inputs and outputs of urban tourism development, this paper not only introduces the method of DEA, but also evaluates the tourism efficiency and total factors productivity by using its related modelsInnovation 3: The tourism efficiency and total factors productivity of 58 Chinese main tourism cities are evaluated, and the spatio-temporal characteristics of them are analyzed at three periods.