Tourism Driver Mechanisms of Metropolitan Area Development: Evidence from the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Marco Greater Bay Area

The combined effect of tourism economic growth has presented an important catalytic and driving role in modern urban development, especially in China's urban regeneration and industrial restructuring. The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) is a new attempt by China's government to comprehensively promote a new pattern of economic opening for metropolitan areas, and tourism development has assumed the role of a window to showcase the quality of the GBA's cities to the world. How to promote the coordinated development of tourism and cities is particularly important in shaping new industries and enhancing the quality of urban development in the GBA. This paper constructs an evaluation index system and uses the improved entropy-weighted Topsis model to calculate the Coordinated Level between Tourism and Urban Development (TUDCL) and applies it to analyze the impact of tourism on promoting urban development in the GBA. The study finds that the TUDCL changes steadily from 2000 to 2019 and currently remains at a medium level, with large differences between cities of different levels, and that there is more room to improve the TUDCL of peripheral cities in the GBA such as Huizhou, Jiangmen, and Zhaoqing. When the tourism industry grows to a certain size, it can in turn lead to the synergistic growth of other industries in the city. Different cities need to formulate appropriate optimization policies according to their own industry type, tourism resource endowment, economic openness, and location conditions. This study proposes a scientific and effective evaluation index system to identify the level of coordination between tourism and urban development in the GBA and distils the contribution of different factors and the time sequence of their influence in stages, which is of positive significance in understanding the synergistic relationship between tourism and urban development and provides theoretical reference for planning a quality living circle suitable for living, working, and traveling in the GBA.