

doi:10.3808/jei.202500533
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Exploring the Inequality and Driving Factors in China’s Tourism Industry from the Perspective of Water-Energy Nexus
Abstract
A large number of studies have been undertaken to examine the impact of tourism on the local resource carrying capacity. However, the indirect non-local environmental impact of tourism was largely overlooked in existing studies from the perspective of supply chain and industrial linkage. Although tourism is a non-material production sector, it has very strong industrial linkage driving effects. In addition, it can not only promote local resource consumption, but also drive that of other regions through the supply chain. In this paper, an environmentally extended multi-regional input-output model combining tourism satellite account is established to investigate China’s interprovincial tourism water footprint (TWF) and tourism energy footprint (TEF) in 2012 ~ 2015. Our results indicate that TEF has increased by 61%, which is about twice the increase in TWF (37%), due to the contribution of water efficiency improvement being higher than energy use efficiency. Results demonstrated that the rapid growth of tourism exaggerated the unbalanced regional water and energy consumption. The environmental Gini coefficient of TWF and TEF consumption intensity increased from 0.386 to 0.43 and from 0.216 to 0.242, respectively in 2012 ~ 2015. The lower tourism income regions (Northwest and Northeast regions) tend to generate higher water and energy consumption intensity. From the perspective of water-energy nexus, the improvement of water use efficiency could result in great TEF alleviation. Our research provides the quantification tool of regional inequality and driving factors of tourism industry from the water-energy nexus perspective. This can be extended to other countries and regions in the world to reveal the deeper relationship between tourism and resources.
Keywords: China, environmentally extended input-output, Gini coefficients, structural decomposition analysis, tourism, water-energy nexus
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