| Under the circumstances of China’s New Normal, the need for transition and upgrading of tourism industry becomes more urgent, so the long-term focus only on the total size of tourism ought to be shifted, and a brand-new perspective should be taken to coordinate the relationship between tourism enterprises and regions. Efficiency evaluation is an important tool to improve enterprises’production efficiency and management level. With the view of efficiency, the analysis of temporal and spatial evolution of China’s tourism efficiency can effectively examine the road for the development of China’s tourism industry, and promote the regional tourism development driving force to transfer from factor driving force and investment driving force to innovation and technology driving forces. Citing the panel data from 2002 to 2013, this dissertation develops along the main line of "construction indexes-calculation efficiency -- temporal and spatial contrasting-driving mechanism". Such methods as DEA model, gravity center, standard deviational ellipses, ESDA, POOL panel data are adopted to measure the temporal and spatial evolution pattern of tourism efficiency, trade efficiency and element efficiency in 31 provinces, and investigate the driving mechanism of the temporal and spatial evolution of tourism efficiency. The study results can provide quantitative reference for the tourism industry to judge the insufficiency or redundancy of resource investment, reveal the relative status changes of tourism industry across provinces, help each region to choose the best path for increasing tourism industry efficiency, guide enterprise to make scientific investment, and evade blindness and invalidity of tourism development.Firstly, this dissertation reviews past studies of tourism efficiency at home and abroad. The result shows that although the research has been deepened and widened, the spatial study of tourism industry efficiency is still insufficient, and there is a lack of comparative study between tourism industry efficiencies. Therefore, deeper research of the internal efficiency of tourism industry needs to be done. The dissertation analyzes and defines the concepts of tourism industry efficiency, trade efficiency and element efficiency, and elaborates how the system theory, theory of economic growth, spatial economics provide foundational support for tourism efficiency studies.Secondly, the dissertation measures the tourism efficiency from 2002 to 2013 in China’s 31 provinces. The result shows that tourism industry efficiency demonstrates the characteristic of volatility in terms of time sequence; and in spite of the development of the tourism industry, tourism industry efficiency doesn’t have obvious growth effect. From the perspective of decomposed efficiency, scale efficiency is more influential in comprehensive efficiency. The fact that scale efficiency value is lower than pure technical efficiency values in many provinces reflects that it’s important to arrange elements of input and output reasonably to enhance tourism industry. In terms of the spatial evolution, "T"-shaped pattern is prominent in scale efficiency, and the score of scale efficiency in the East is lower than that in the Midwest; pure technical efficiency has more inter-provincial differences than scale efficiency, interannual variability of spatial pattern is significant, and the East is better than the West at technology application. By the influence of scale and technical efficiency, comprehensive efficiency illustrates weak spatial correlation and a lack of mutual influence and restriction on the comprehensive efficiency value between neighboring provinces, and spatial pattern changes from "T"-shaped pattern to "V"-shaped pattern.With regard to the industry efficiency of attractions, hotels and travel agencies, the industry efficiency of attractions is the lowest and is most vulnerable to the overall tourism environment and fluctuations; hotel industry efficiency is comparatively high and the most stable, and travel agency industry efficiency occupies the middle position. Moreover, regarding the spatial pattern evolution part, attraction efficiency changed frequently before 2004 and didn’t show any regularity; then its spatial distribution transformed into agglomeration situation in 2005-2007, and gradually formed western and southeastern cores in 2009-2013. The spatial pattern of hotel efficiency was an inverted Ω-shaped pattern before 2008, whereas after 2008 the advantages of the southeast coastal area become prominent, and disadvantage of the Mid-west emerges. Because technical reform and innovation plays an important role in improving hotel efficiency, there forms the core area in the Southeast. The spatial pattern of travel agency efficiency demonstrates an E-shaped pattern, while the Southeast has a higher efficiency score than the Northwest, but recently the efficiency difference between eastern and western regions has a narrowing trend.From the perspective of spatial evolution characteristics of element efficiency in material capital, human resources and enterprise scale, there exists excessive investment in the three elements. The interannual variability of the three elements in attractions industry is higher than those in hotel and travel agency industry, and has low stability; hotel industry is the highest in material capital efficiency and increases the enterprise scale efficiency year by year, but the human capital efficiency remains stable with a slight decline; three element efficiencies of travel agency industry are steady on the whole but decline a little in the recent years. From the point of view of spatial pattern, the internal differences in the East, the Middle, the West and the Northeast is far bigger than those between the regions. In the last three years regions of high value in tourism element efficiency become more concentrated, and form two core areas:the eastern core area represented by Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong in, and the western part the other one represented by Tibet and Ningxia.At last, the paper analyzes the influence on the tourism industry efficiency and the three major industries’efficiency exerted by seven factors:geographic condition, human resources support, market potential, the third industry scale, market level, the level of information and tourism industry scale. The result shows that five major driving forces which constituted by ten factors conduct the evolution and development of the temporal and spatial pattern. The result shows that at the micro-level resource value, market demand and transformation of traveling way impose important influence on the space-time evolution in the tourism element efficiency; at the meso-level, human resources support, marketization degree, information level and tourism overall development level have a far-reaching impact on the space-time evolution in tourism trade efficiency; at the macro-level, location, the service industry development level and the social and economic level have a profound impact on the space-time evolution in tourism industry efficiency. Under the combined effects by the ten factors, such driving forces as resource, policy, location, market and geopolitical environment eventually guide the evolution of temporal and spatial pattern in tourism industry efficiency. |
