A study on the economic driving effect of inbound tourism by the establishment of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones: A quasi-natural experiment

Abstract

The establishment of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones is an important initiative for China to promote a high level of opening up to the outside world and to strengthen economic and cultural exchanges between countries internationally, and its prosperous economic activities provide an opportunity for the development of inbound tourism at the same time. The article uses the establishment of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones (hereafter Pilot Zones) as a quasi-natural experiment to systematically assess the impact of the establishment of the Pilot Zones on the development of inbound tourism using a multi-stage double difference method based on balanced panel data for 282 prefecture-level cities in China from 2010 to 2019. The study finds that the establishment of the Pilot Zones significantly promotes the development of inbound tourism.Compared with the cities in the non-cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones, the inbound tourism foreign exchange income of the cities set up as the pilot zones increased by about 15.4% on average. This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests, such as parallel trend test, placebo test, replacement of explained variables, and winsorization.Besides, the Pilot Zones have promoted the development of inbound tourism through two mechanisms of opening up effect and Internet construction effect. Furthermore, there is a significant difference in the promotion effect of the establishment of the pilot zones on inbound tourism, and its policy effect is more significant in provincial capitals, but not in megacities and supercities. The study provides an empirical basis for exploiting the welfare effects of China's cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones policy to achieve an efficient recovery of inbound tourism in the new development phase. At the same time, it provides strong support for the implementation of the decision-making and deployment of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) for Tourism Development and provides policy reference for better exerting the promoting effect of the Pilot Zones on inbound tourism development, summarizing regional advantages and promoting advanced experience.