Tourism Economics, 2014, 20 (1), 157–169 doi: 10.5367/te.2013.0260
Assessing the impacts of the high-speedtrain on tourism demand in China
YORK QI YAN
School of Humanities, Nanjing Forestry University, 159 Longpan Road, Xuanwu,Nanjing, Jiangsu, China. E-mail: yorknjcn@. (Corresponding author.)
HANQIN QIU ZHANG
School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
Kowloon, Hong Kong.
BEN HAOBIN YE
School of Management, Sun Yat-sun University, Guangzhou, China.
The high-speed railway has been an appropriate embodiment bothof China’s phenomenal rise and of its inherent economic and socialdilemmas, which are assuming growing regional and internationalrelevance. This study develops an econometric model to investigatethe impacts of the Wuhan–Guangzhou high-speed railway ondomestictourism receipts in three Chinese provinces. The auto regressive andmoving average (ARMA) model is integrated into a time seriesapproximation and analysis. The results indicate that, while theprovinces of Guangdong and Hunan have benefited from the high-speed railway, it has limited influence on Hubei province. Thetheoretical contributions and practical implications of the study arealso elaborated.
Keywords:high-speed railway; tourism receipts; ARMA model; China
Advancement in transportation technology has long been regarded as one of thethree pillars underlying the prosperity of modern tourism, the other two beingsoaring disposable income and increased leisure time (Cooper and Wahab, 2001;Fayos-Sola and Bueno, 2001). It has even been argued that tourism itself isabout transport, semantically and practically (Kaul, 1985). A common agree-ment has been reached that the provision of transport infrastructure is anecessary precondition for the development of the tourism industry, and evenThe first author would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Research Fund of NanjingForestry University for Returned Overseas Scholars (No. YJ-201207).
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for the destination dependent on tourism at large (Abeyratne, 1993; Chew,1987; Page, 1994). In China, which is projected to become one of the world’stop destinations by 2020 (UNWTO, 2010), a landmark development in thefield of tourism transportation has been the construction and operation in thepast decade of the China Railway High-speed (CRH) Train. At the end of 2012,18,000 km of high-speed railway had been constructed, and the highest speedthe train had reached was 350 km/h, both taking first position in the world(MOR, 2011). It is planned that by 2020 10,000 km of high-speed railwaywill have been built, connecting all major cities and covering 90% of thecountry’s population.However, ever since the planning of the high-speed railway, it has been thesubject of considerable controversy, which peaked after a fatal collision of twohigh-speed trains in July 2011. In addition to potential safety concerns, themajority of disputes have centred on the economic contributions of the railway,especially in light of the huge costs involved in the construction of the railwayand the train, as well as the business efficiency of the current trains. Whileconsideration from the tourism perspective is assuming growing significance inthe literature on the cost and benefits of CRH trains both in China andinternationally (Shao, 2012), little work has been undertaken to address therelationships between the operation of CRH trains and tourism developmentin local destinations. This paper intends to fill this research gap by analysingthe tourism impact of CRH trains in a comprehensive, consistent and context-relevant manner. Our objectives are twofold: to explore and model the majorfactors pertinent to the tourism impacts of CRH trains; and to evaluate andcompare the economic impacts of CRH trains on the tourism development inselected Chinese destinations.
Literature review
Transport and tourism development
The importance of transport in destination development has been acknowledgedfrom economic, socio-cultural, anthropological, environmental and technicalperspectives (Martin and Witt, 1988; Hall, 1991; Inskeep, 1991; Gunn, 1994;Page, 1994, 1999). Pan (2005) portrays tourism transport as a dynamic andcomplex system constantly interacting with other components of the tourismsystem. In the classic tourism system proposed by Leiper (1990), transportserves as the key channel linking traveller generating and destination regions.According to elaborations on core–periphery interactions by Hohl and Tisdell(1995), transport provides the very medium through which resources, capital,technologies, industries as well as markets are clustered, thereby rippling theeconomic potential of the core to the peripheral regions. In this sense, transportplays an important role not only in shaping the relationships between the coreand peripheral regions, but also in shifting such relationships should there bechanges in the transport contexts (Pearce, 2002). Therefore, the dynamics ofregional tourism industries hinge greatly on the transport conditions, especiallywhen it comes to those regions under the transformation from reliance onexternal support to self-sustainability (Prideaux, 2000).
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