A Spatial Spillover Simulation To Identify Tourism Destination Circles In China

Regional tourism cooperation has been an inevitable trend in the process of tourism development, and its main form is tourism destination circle (TDC). According to incomplete calculation, there are more than30tourism destination circles proposed by the academia and government. Then, are these tourism destination circles reasonable, if they have the inherent motivation,or just the government’s "wishful thinking", if reasonable, how to define its scale. So, the identifition and definition of the tourism destination circle has been an scientific problom,which also has received widespread attention from scholars.But the methods used mostly are subjective qualitative analysis, and quantitative calculation from the perspectives of tourism supply,and lacking the view of market demand and explanation of the economic mechanism. Therefore, an ABS platform on prefecture-level city spatial scale is built to measure tourism spillover based on Geographic Information System,including the socio-economic data of361prefecture-level cities in mainland China and19894A and above scenic spots(calculated from the8227travel lines offered by top100travel agencies. Then the paper designs the utility maximization principle accroading to the tourists’behavior,and to model typical tourist consumer behaviors, such as sightseeing, vacation, self-driving, three kinds of tourist behavior rules are designed and named the total utility maximization, fixed-node utility maximization and mobile-node utility maximization. According to these rules, the ABS platform simulates tourism spillovers based on the selecting behaviors. Also, according to the simulation results of tourists’cross-boundary behavior, the study identifies optimum tourism destination circles in mainland China.The dissertation consists of four chapters according to the structure from throry carding to model building to simulation analysis.In Chapter1:through reviewing the relevant researches about TDC,we find there are some limits in methods and views,and put forward to judge the effectiveness of the inter-regional tourism cooperation from the perspectives of tourism spillovers. Furthermore, how to measure the tourism spillovers, previously documented four mainstream models for regional tourism spillover effects, which are the seemingly unrelated equation (SUE), the simultaneous equation model(SEM), the gap model(GP) and the spatial econometric model (SEM).However,the SEM and the SUE are diffcult to effectively portray tourism spillovers on large sample,and the SEM solves this defect,but these three methods all ignore some important factors,GP does and increases explanatory power of empirical phenomenas.Overall, none of these four methods are able to give consideration to micro-mechanism and multi-region interaction,so it is necessary to introduce new approach.Considering the inherent advantages in the study of complex system and widely using in the tourism simulation,the paper intends to adopt ABS to modle the tourism spillovers.In Chapter2:the paper builds an ABS model from tourism spillovers simulation environment, tourist agent and behavior rules. And then summarize three typical tourist consumer behaviors, such as sightseeing, vacation and self-driving, three kinds of tourist behavior rules are designed also and named the total utility maximization, fixed-node utility maximization and mobile-node utility maximization. While the data sources and the processing is described in this section too.In Chapter3:Since the mainly phenomenon of the tourism spillovers is tourists’ cross-boundary behavior,the paper analyzes the simulation results by using the tourism domain interaction time. Simulations and empirical findings show that nine optimum tourism destination circles can be developed in mainland China under strong constraint.They are Yangtze River Delta TDC,Jingjin TDC,Xi’an TDC,Shandong TDC,Taiyuan TDC,the Southern Anhui TDC, Liaoning TDCand Changzhutan TDC.while with week constraint, the scales of these TDCs continue to expand and the number can increase to foureen. Finally,the paper researches the spatial pattern of these TDCs,and selects Changzhutan TDC as a case to study deeply.In Chapter4:Summarize the full article,and put forward some further discussions,such as the data selecting of the scenic spots and traffic distance,the interaction among tourist agents and so on,we will continue to pay more attention in future research.