Poverty reduction effects of integrating high-quality development and cultural tourism in China

The integration of the cultural tourism industry with high-quality development is believed to be an important method of alleviating poverty. Most research in this area has focused on single towns, cities, or regions without considering the spillover effects of neighboring areas. To fill this gap, this study applies a spatial panel econometric model to empirically test the spatial spillover effects of integrating the cultural tourism industry with high-quality developments and their mechanisms of poverty alleviation based on provincial panel data of the Chinese Mainland from 2010 to 2020. Four key results are presented. First, there is an obvious spatial dependence on the high-quality development scale, specialization level, and poverty level of cultural tourism integration. The common panel model is found to overestimate the impact of this integration on poverty alleviation because it ignores the spatial spillover-related explanatory variables. Second, the scale of development quality is found to have no significant impact on poverty alleviation when integrating cultural tourism; however, the level of development specialization has both a direct impact on poverty alleviation and the spatial spillover effect. Third, the integration of the cultural tourism industry in the Central and Western regions is shown to have a strong direct effect on poverty reduction through high-quality development. However, the spillover effect on poverty reduction in the Eastern region is greater than that in the Central and Western regions. Fourth, the integration of high-quality development and cultural tourism is found to have a direct impact on poverty alleviation overall by promoting tourism consumption, material capital accumulation, and structural transformation.