Abstract

Based on China’s provincial panel data of the export, GDP, trade distance and inbound tourism income from 1997 to 2014, this study examines the export effect of inbound tourism in China, using dynamic panel data models and system GMM estimators. The empirical results for the estimations of the gravity equation demonstrate that inbound tourism promoted China's export through expanding the degree of opening to the outside world, shortening the cultural distance, "advertising effect" and "Marco Polo effect" of business tourism. Inbound tourism has a significant positive export effect, export will increase by 0.135 % when inbound tourism increases by 1%.

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