The Impact of Air Pollution on the Development of Inbound Tourism in Chinese Megacities: The Case Study of Beijing, Guangzhou and Chongqing
The existing studies pay more attention to the impact of public transport and other public service facilities on urban air pollution and tourism, but less on the negative effect of air pollution caused by carbon emissions of business fixed investment on inbound tourism. This article attempts to make a supplementary analysis about the above point through examining the correlation between air pollution associate with business fixed investment and the size of inbound tourism based on panel data of three megacities (Beijing, Guangzhou and Chongqing) in China over the period from 2015 to 2019. The findings of this paper show that the effects of air pollution linked with carbon emissions from business fixed investment on the number of inbound tourists (NIT) is a negative correlation, while the influence of GDP per capita and tourism revenue on NIT reveal a positive relationship by applying fixed effects model for benchmark regression and the system-GMM estimator for robustness check. Moreover, the negative influence of PM 10 on sample cities is more than PM2.5. Some different results of core variables between benchmark and sub-sample regressions don’t imply the above conclusion to be substantively changed because of different distribution and concentration of nominal inbound tourists in specific sample megacities. In order to fundamentally improve air quality and to stimulate the development of inbound tourism, the suggestion of this study is to promote new business fixed investment with clean energy of renewable and low carbon.