Air Pollution And Tourism Development

In this paper,we empirically examine the interplay between air pollution and tourism development based on a fine-grained dataset covering monthly-level high-resolution tourism information of 58 major tourism cities in China from October 2013 to December 2017.We adopt an empirical strategy utilizing wind speed,an exogenous meteorological condition independent of economic activities,as an instrumental variable for air pollution to deal with the endogeneity cause by the reverse causality.We control for individual city fixed effects,monthly trend,meteorological conditions and other social factors of tourism destinations.We find that(1)overall,air pollution has a significant negative impact on tourism development in China;(2)There is a nonlinear relationship between air pollution and tourism development.When the air quality is good,the negative impact of air pollution on tourism development is small;When air pollution increases,the impact on urban tourism development will also increase;(3)the negative effect of air pollution on tourism development can last for a certain long period(3 months in our study);and(4)destination cities tourism resources and hospitality infrastructure can partially offset the negative effect of air pollution on tourism development.We also analyzed the mechanism of air pollution affecting tourism development based on online travel order data of223 prefecture-level cities in China from February 1,2019 to October 30,2019.Our study offers significant empirical evidence for China to design policies that can mitigate the consequences of air pollution in the tourism sector and manage the development of tourism economy.