Abstract
Tourism development makes significant contributions to the modern economic system, while simultaneously generating profound environmental externalities. However, the effects and mechanisms by which tourism development affects air pollution are still unclear, possibly due to model uncertainty arising from the complexity of air pollution sources. Therefore, based on a novel combined empirical strategy and high-quality multi-source datasets of 284 Chinese cities, this paper uncovers whether and how tourism development can affect air pollution in the context of “government, enterprise, and public” pluralistic environmental co-governance. The results reveal that: (1) Tourism development has a significant air pollution mitigation effect in China’s campaign against air pollution. A 1% increase in tourism specialization directly reduces air pollution by 0.1925%. (2) Two single mediation channels are found: “tourism development → public environmental concern → air pollution”, “tourism development → industrial structure → air pollution”. Additionally, there are two serial mediation channels: “tourism development → government environmental governance → public environmental concern → air pollution” and “tourism development → government environmental governance → industrial structure → air pollution”. (3) The above evidence provides meaningful policy implications for China to address the intractable problem of environmental governance. (4) The empirical strategy of innovatively integrating Bayesian model averaging, structural equation modeling, and panel data is effective, especially for macroscopic variables with complex influence mechanisms. (5) The relevant empirical evidence may have limited external validity outside of China, but the proposed empirical strategy can provide new strategic options to reveal the multi-path mechanisms at the macro level.
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The datasets are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Notes
See more details: https://www.mct.gov.cn/whzx/whyw/202003/t20200310_851786.htm
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This work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 21BJY194]; the Natural Science Foundation of Hainan Province [grant number 722RC631].
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Tong, Y., Pang, L. & Li, H. The air pollution mitigation effect of tourism development and its formation mechanism: new insights from BMA and SEM approaches. Air Qual Atmos Health 16, 2095–2113 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-023-01393-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-023-01393-2