Linking ecological infrastructure and tourism development through environmental governance: evidence from cities of China

This paper uses the spatial panel data model of 272 cities in China from 2000 to 2010 to explore the relationship between ecological infrastructure and tourism development to determine the influencing degree of ecological infrastructure on tourism development. It is found that the expansion of ecological infrastructure has promoted tourism development, with different regional performances. For subsamples with different environmental governance capacities, the expansion of ecological infrastructure generates greater and more tourism growth only for cities with the best ecological infrastructure (BEI cities). In exploring the potential mechanism, BEI cities have the strongest environmental governance effect, followed by cities with good ecological infrastructure (GEI cities) and cities with normal ecological infrastructure (NEI cities), while negative environmental governance effect exists in cities with poor ecological infrastructure (PEI cities). Environmental governance capacity is critical for promoting tourism growth. On spatial correlation, NEI and PEI cities compete for tourism development, but promote each other in BEI and GEI cities, while both ecological infrastructure and environmental governance capacity have a neighbor-companion relationship. The contributions of this paper are: (1) Cities with different types have heterogeneous characteristics. (2) The mechanism linking ecological infrastructure and tourism development is environmental governance effect, with different effects in different types of cities. (3) Spatial interaction among cities is fully considered.