Understanding the Evolution of Regional Tourism Efficiency: Through the Lens of Evolutionary Economic Geography

To further understand the evolution of regional tourism efficiency, a more systematic and theoretical analysis is required. Taking the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River as a case, this study applied evolutionary economic geography to analyze the evolutionary process of regional tourism efficiency. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and the Malmquist index were used to measure the regional tourism efficiency and total factors productivity changes. Moreover, this paper employed the semi-variogram, Kriging interpolation, and Markov chain to explore the spatiotemporal evolution and transition characteristics of regional tourism efficiency. Finally, based on the test results of Geo-detector, the driving mechanism of the spatiotemporal evolution of regional tourism efficiency was constructed. The results show that the overall tourism development was inefficient, and the leading sources of inefficiency were primarily embedded in pure technology inefficiency, while the main contributor to the growth of total factor productivity was the positive technical change. Over time, the spatial spillover effect of regional tourism continued to increase, and the spatial pattern changed from divergence to convergence, resulting in co-evolution. The inertial trajectory of the evolution of regional tourism efficiency reveals a significant path dependence. Factors such as traffic accessibility, tourism resource endowments, tourism specialization, industrial structure, informatization, and openness can reasonably explain the evolution of regional tourism efficiency.