关键词: 沙漠地区旅游业, 旅客运输, 空间格局, PVAR模型, 动态响应

Abstract:

With the wide distribution of deserts throughout northwest China, desert area tourism products are located at a distance from eastern tourist-intensive cities and visitors primarily rely on civil aviation transport to reach scenic desert spots. Based on indices of civil aviation transport, such as the number of tourists, income, passenger throughput, number of airlines, and navigation cities of desert areas from 2009 to 2019, this paper evaluated the space-time development relationship between desert tourism in China and civil aviation passenger transport using the spatial adjacency, analyses of the buffer zone, and the panel vector autoregression model. The three major conclusions are as follows. (1) Distributed along the centerline of the Silk Road Economic Belt, tourism resources in China’s desert areas are denser in the north-central and northwestern areas. (2) Of the 45 desert scenic spots covered by airports with civil aviation passenger transport, 86.7% have superior accessibility, while only 6 have inferior accessibility according to this study. This result shows that the development of desert tourism is strongly influenced by civil aviation passenger transport. Moreover, the buffer distances between most of the desert scenic spots and the civil aviation passenger transport airports are medium-range, with short distance and medium-short distance buffers accounting for 73.3% of the total, reflecting the high adjacency, namely, the high spatial dependency, between tourism in desert areas and civil aviation passenger transport. (3) The findings of the co-integration test show that there is a long-term and stable equilibrium between tourism in desert areas and civil aviation passenger transport. According to the impulse response and variance decomposition, it can be concluded that, in the short run, desert tourism has positive and negative interactivity with civil aviation passenger transport, while in the long run, desert tourism will promote the development of the latter. In return, civil aviation passenger transport will boost desert tourism by expanding the number of navigation cities and the market for passenger resources. For the future development of tourism and civil aviation passenger transport in desert areas, we can improve via the following three aspects: first, continuously improving the air transport capacity of desert areas; second, continuously promoting the development of tourism by seizing the strategic opportunity of the Silk Road Economic Belt, integrating existing desert tourism resources, and tapping deep into cultural connotations to instill content and soul in the product of desert tourism to build a well-known desert tourism brand in China and worldwide; and third, adhering to the integrative development strategy of “tourism plus transport”. By taking advantage of low altitude sightseeing by short distance civil aviation passenger transport and giving full play to the link-up of civil aviation transport, an integrative development brand and pattern of desert tourism and transport can be built.

Key words: desert tourism, passenger transportation, spatial pattern, panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model, dynamic response