Valuing Air Quality In The Tourism Urban Areas Based On The Tourist Satisfaction Approach

In recent years,a wide range of haze weather in China has generated a considerable negative effect on tourists' interest of travel and their tourism experience,thus the tourists' satisfaction of tourism participation is significantly reduced.Owing to the fact that air quality has become one key factor of tourism demand,it is imperative to carry out valuing air quality study in the tourism urban areas in terms of both theoretical and empirical aspects.Literature review indicates that a large body of literature has addressed the issues of valuing air quality in municipal tourism using the methods of the TCM,CVM,as well as LSA.A general consensus has been reached regarding the scientific quality of each of those research methods and related estimation results.However,most studies on economic valuation of air quality in the past were from local resident point of view,none of previous studies on valuing air quality took the tourist's viewpoint.It is well received that many differences exist between tourists and local urban people in terms of their demographic characteristics,environmental preferences,and flexibilities of choosing living environment,and the standards of air quality requirement.These may ultimately result in different air quality values out of these two different groups of consumers.Based on this rudimentary assumption,this paper makes attempt in valuing the tourism urban air quality using the Tourist Satisfaction Approach(TSA)and comparing its evaluated results with those developed based on the local urban residents.Through visitor's survey and information gathered from the government publications and documents,we established a database which covers 29 primary tourism cities in China.The database encompasses the following major items: demographics,social economics,and the tourism satisfaction.These data items are then utilized to estimate the value of air quality using the three alternative econometric models including Ordered probit,Ordered logit,and OLS.The estimate results show that the following factors such as environment air quality,climate condition,crowding,natural resource richness,social security,and traffic smooth all exhibit statistical significant effects on the tourist satisfaction,thus on the economic value of the air quality in the tourism cities.Among which air quality has a statistically significant negative effect on the degree of tourist satisfaction.The tourists' marginal willingness to pay toward the urban air quality is ?135.8 for PM10(1?g/m3),?185.5 for SO2(?g/m3),and ?339.1 for NO2(?g/m3),respectively.Those results are considerable higher than those developed from the local urban people,which is probably due to the habitual trait of the local urban consumers,causing them to be less sensitive to the lower air quality.