Narrow Results

This paper aims to examine the relationship between tourism and economic growth in China’s eight central provinces through the annual data from 1995 to 2019 using quantile-on-quantile approaches. Results show a positive relationship between tourism and economic growth for China’s eight central provinces considered with substantial variations across provinces and quantiles within each province. The weakest relationship was noted for Shanxi, possibly because of the limited importance of the tourism sector relative to other major economic activities in this province. For Heilongjiang, Hubei, Hunan and Jilin, the most pronounced relationship between tourism activities and economic growth was observed only during the period of a deep economic upturn. The main reason for the economic downturn is that economic development during the periods of severe acute respiratory syndrome, avian influenza, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus and coronavirus disease 2019 pandemics impacted tourist arrivals. Important provincial-specific policy implications may be drawn from these findings.

As China exhibited unprecedented rapid economic growth ever since its reform and opening, the development and sources of labor productivity has gradually come to the forefront. This paper studies the development and the source of labor productivity in 31 Chinese provinces during 2000–2009. The labor productivity is investigated through an examination at both the levels and the growth rate. Particularly, we first look at the production function relationship, to see the contribution of labor and other production factors to the gross domestic product. Then, a number of possible determinants are defined. They are regressed on the level and the growth rate of labor productivity to shed light on their relationships. Controlled for unobserved time-specific and province-specific effects, the fixed effects model with heteroskedasticity robust adjustments have been used for the estimation of three functions. Regional breakdown shows severe disparity in the economy where three municipal cities have the highest labor productivity among other regions. Subsequently, we summarize the different sources and their contributions to labor productivity and provide several policy suggestions.