Convergence And Spatio-temporal Difference Of Tourism Carbon Productivity In China

Tourism carbon emissions have become an important source of greenhouse gas and an important factor affecting climate change.Reducing carbon emissions from tourism is of great significance to the development of China's low-carbon economy.Regional differences of low-carbon tourism economy are important factors that must be considered when we formulate the policy to reduce the tourism carbon emissions.And as we all known,tourism carbon productivity can measure the regional differences of low-carbon tourism economy.In view of this,we can effectively measure tourism carbon productivity and understand its regional differences,convergence characteristics and its influencing factors,which are meaningful for achieving the goal of energy saving and emission reduction and balancing the development of low-carbon tourism.First of all,based on the method of "bottom-up",this paper estimated the tourism carbon productivity of 30 provinces in China from 1995 to 2015.By using the standard deviation and coefficient of variation,from the two perspectives of absolute difference and relative difference,we analyzed the regional differences of tourism carbon productivity.And then used the Theil index to further decompose the regional differences and explore the structural factors leading to the regional differences.Secondly,we explored the spatial distribution and evolution of China's tourism carbon productivity with the help of spatial statistics methods.Finally,according to the results of self-correlation analysis,we constructed spatial econometrics models to research the convergence and the drivers of China's tourism carbon productivity.The results show:(1)In the time series,the overall carbon productivity of tourism in China and its three major regions of eastern,central and western China fluctuate upward during 1995 to 2015.Meanwhile,the average annual growth rate of tourism carbon productivity in the western region is higher than the central and the eastern regions'.In terms of spatial distribution,the regional differences in China's tourism carbon productivity are obvious.The overall characteristic of spatial distribution is that tourism in the eastern has the highest carbon productivity,followed by the central and the lowest is in the northwest.As well as,in most parts of the country the tourism carbon productivity is at medium and low levels,and few is at high levels,and(2)the absolute difference of China's tourism carbon productivity and the relative difference all show a decreasing trend.The differences among regions in the east,middle and west regions are the main reasons for the regional differences in carbon productivity of tourism in our country,and the between-region differences have less impact on them.Further decomposition of intra-regional differences and find that the internal differences in the eastern region is the main source of differences in China's tourism carbon productivity within the region,while the differences in the central and western region have less impact.(3)The Moran's I index of the tourism carbon productivity during 1995 to 2015 range from 0.0716 to 0.2217,and all of them pass the 5%significant level test except the year of 2014 and 2015 which pass the 10%significant level test.It indicates that China's tourism carbon productivity has a significant spatial dependence.And(4)China's tourism carbon productivity has both the absolute ? convergence and the ?convergence,and the convergence rates are 6.65%and 32.91%respectively.On the one hand,the tourism energy intensity and tourism carbon emissions structure negatively affect the convergence of China's tourism carbon productivity,while the energy emissions ratio,economic level and urbanization have a positive affect on it.On the other hand,the effect of trade dependence and the population on the convergence of China's tourism carbon productivity is not significant.