No abstract

Since independence in 1950s Malaysia has been recognized as one of the more successful countries in fighting poverty: head count ratio came down to 5.7% by 2004. However the recent process of rapid urbanization has led to an increase of urban poverty aggravated further by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. It is important to understand the nature and scale of urbanization, the various driving forces that affect it and the determinants of urban poverty as linked to this process. Our research identified the determinants of urban poverty in Malaysia using a logistic regression. A sample of 2,403 urban households from the 2004-05 Household Expenditure Survey (HES) had been used in this research. We first estimated the probability of households with specified characteristics to fall below Malaysia's official poverty line. Then we analyzed the sensitivity of the probability estimated to shift of the poverty line over a reasonable range. Results showed that human capital significantly reduced the chance of being poor while migrant workers are more prone to poverty. Household size, race and regions were also important determinants of poverty outcome in urban Malaysia. The findings had important policy implications for Malaysian government which had pledged to reduce overall poverty rate to 2.8% and eradicated hardcore poverty by 2010 under the Ninth Malaysian Plan.

Tourism plays a crucial role in alleviating poverty deprivations and achieving sustainable development. Nevertheless, there is a lack of literature regarding evaluating poor residents’ perceptions of the impacts of tourism on poverty alleviation from the perspective of multidimensional poverty. Taking Fenghuang County, China, as the study area, this study established an evaluation framework by using the Delphi method based on multidimensional poverty theory. Moreover, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was employed to identify the weight of each indicator and assess poor residents’ perceptions of the impacts of tourism on poverty alleviation. The results indicate that tourism economic development has been a momentous contributor to alleviating multidimensional poverty in study locations to a certain extent (3.180). However, there is still room for improvement and promotion. With respect to various dimensions, the mean of economic level is the highest (1.125), whilst the means of education training (0.420) and health care (0.819) are relatively lower than the other dimensions.

Despite the recognition of the relationship between technological innovation and tourism development, there is a dearth of rigorous empirical specifications to examine the effect of technological innovation on the latter. With 27 cities of the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration (YRDUA) in China as an empirical case, this study explores whether technological innovation can promote tourism development by using a series of panel regression models. The empirical results indicate that technological innovation has a positive effect on the development of tourism in the YRDUA. With respect to different regions, types of cities, and stages, there are differences in the positive impact of technological innovation on tourism development. Additionally, the impact of different types of technological innovations on tourism development is also diverse.

The social network analysis has been actively applied in various tourist destinations, with a few studies on the tourism economic network structure of national parks. Taking the national parks in the Central Region of China as research objects, this study applies the modified gravity model to measure the strength of tourism economic connection. The social network analysis method (SNA) is used to analyze the network structure of tourism economic connection among national parks from the perspectives of overall network density, network centrality, and cohesive subgroups. The results show that the intensity of the tourism relationships among national parks in Central China is unbalanced in spatial distribution. The structure of tourism economic network presents a multi-core model. Lushan Mountain, Shaoshan, Wudang Mountain, and other national parks play a necessary role in the transmission of regional tourism economic elements. There are cohesive subgroups of connections among national parks, which are closely related to administrative divisions and regional cultural background. The subgroups of interior scenes in the same province are more closely related, and the degree of tourism integration still needs to be improved. The study advances the understanding of tourism economic network relationships among tourist attractions in a destination.