ECONOMIC VULNERABILITY OF SPECIALIZED TOURISM CITY: A CASE STUDY IN SOUTHWEST OF CHINA

Abstract

Global epidemics, wars, and lack of resources pose threats to society and the tertiary industry. After the world went through a period of de-globalization for a short period of time since the year 2019, the Global tourism industry suffers a fatal blow. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the economic vulnerability of a specialized tourism city Dali (a typical tourism city in China) and propose risk avoidance strategies for its sustainable tourism development. This paper establishes a vulnerability assessment model from the aspects of sensitivity and responding capacity by using the set pair analysis (SPA) model to evaluate the economic vulnerability of Dali. The obstacle evaluation model and the entropy value method were used to analyze its obstacle factors. This research employs the National Economic and Social Development Statistics as its primary data source, augmented by the Statistical Yearbook and Yearbooks from different years. The results show that the change of the vulnerability of Dali's tourism economic system is relatively stable, but in general the vulnerability is at a high level in most years. According to the analysis of obstacle factors, the ratio of tourist arrivals to local population, Elasticity coefficient of tourism to industrial growth and National economy (GDP) output value are the main obstacles to reduce the vulnerability of Dali's tourism economy.

Keywords

• tourism industry vulnerability
• tourism specialization
• tourism economic system
• sustainable tourism development
• set pair analysis