A STUDY ON THE IMPACT OF NATIONAL ECOTOURISM COORDINATION ZONE ON REGIONAL ECONOMIC SYNERGY

Abstract

The construction of tourism integration is of great significance to the synergistic regional economic development. In this paper, we consider the construction of the "Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian and Jiangxi National Ecotourism Coordination Zone" as a quasi-natural experiment for the development of inter-regional tourism integration. It constructs a prefecture and city-level panel data of Zhejiang, Anhui, Fujian and Jiangxi Ecotourism Coordination Zone to study the impact of the construction of tourism integration on the synergistic development of the regional economy. The empirical results show that the construction of regional tourism integration can significantly promote the synergistic development of the intercity economy. In the robustness analysis, the robustness of the results is illustrated by changing the representative indicators of economic development, among other methods. In addition, the promotion of tourism integration construction for economic synergistic development has a heterogeneous effect between inter-provincial cities and non-inter-provincial cities. Tourism integration construction can help synergistic development between regional economies by promoting the synchronous upgrading of industrial structures in target cities. This paper illustrates the important role of tourism integration policy for economic synergistic development in the context of synergistic regional economic development and puts forward policy suggestions for cross-regional tourism integration construction, which can help further enhance the promotion of integration construction for regional economic synergistic development, so as to realize a higher-quality regional coordinated development.