Abstract: Tourism development, as an effective way to alleviate poverty, has attracted attention from governments of different levels and people of all walks of life in China. Therefore, it is urgent to make scientific assessment of the poverty alleviation effect brought about by tourism development so as to provide useful reference for making practical policy on poverty alleviation through tourism. Based on the panel data from 2000 to 2015 in 31 provinces in China (including municipalities and autonomous regions), this paper assesses the levels of the tourism development in different areas by using entropy method and investigates into the poverty alleviation effect of tourism in those areas by adopting panel threshold model. The results are as follows: (1) Tourism development shows significant poverty alleviation effect. On condition that the control variable is considered, the overall Engel’s Coefficient declines along with the improvement of tourism development levels. However, there is threshold effect according to different tourism development levels. (2) The tourism development levels show significant territorial diversity. The high section mainly consists of provinces in the eastern coastal region, while the low and middle-lower sections mainly consist of the provinces in the central and western regions. Nevertheless, the poverty alleviation effect of tourism development shows a tendency of “east-middle-west” stepwise increase. (3)With the improvement of tourism development levels, the poverty alleviation effect shows a gradual convergence of marginal decrease, that is to say, the maximum poverty alleviation effect happens when the tourism development level is in the low section, the poverty alleviation effect of the tourism development whose level belongs to the middle-lower section takes the second place, the poverty alleviation effect is insignificant when the tourism development level belongs to the middle-higher section, and the poverty alleviation effect of tourism development whose level belongs to the high section declines further. On the whole, the poverty alleviation effect of the different tourism development levels thus declines in the shape of an inverted “J”.Therefore, the positive effect of tourism development on poverty alleviation needs to be emphasized and made full use of, and stages of tourism development need to be accurately recognized so as to make differential policies on poverty alleviation through tourism accordingly; at the same time, the role and function of governments needs to be adjusted in time, multi-agent profit distribution coordination mechanism needs to be constructed, and precautions need to be taken against poverty or repoverty of the poor caused by market rules so that maximum and targeted poverty alleviation through tourism can be achieved.

Key words: tourism development, poverty alleviation, threshold effect, China