过境免签政策的入境旅游效应及其内在机制——以中国57个主要旅游城市为例

The Effects of China's Visa-free Transit Policy on Inbound Tourism and Its Internal Mechanism:A Case Study of 57 Major Tourism Cities in China

以过境免签为代表的签证便利化政策是中国入境旅游的重要制度创新尝试,其效应评估有助于后续制度完善和拓展,但现有文献忽略了其促进入境旅游发展的内在作用机制。文章将72小时过境免签政策实施视作一项准自然实验,基于57个主要旅游城市2004—2019年的面板数据,采用多时点双重差分法,实证分析过境免签政策的入境旅游效应及其机制。研究发现,过境免签政策对城市入境旅游人数和外汇收入均有促进效应,政策效果的主要传导渠道是成本效应而非光环效应。进一步分析发现,过境免签政策对于旅游资源、服务接待能力、地区经济活力、目的地品牌和货物贸易水平等基础性或配套性条件不足的城市尤为重要。文章结论为我国进一步完善签证制度体系提供了实证依据和决策参考。

An important part of the modern economy,tourism has become a key comprehensive industry and a strategic pillar for the national economy.Domestic tourism,outbound tourism and inbound tourism are the three major markets of China's tourism.Compared with the flourishing domestic and outbound tourism,China's inbound tourism is relatively sluggish,with a deficit in the number of inbound tourists and tourism foreign exchange income.China has rich natural resources,splendid history and culture,various cuisine and a sound urban system.However,they have not been fully utilized in attracting inbound tourists,which does not match our economic development and globalization process.The key reason lies in China's low international openness,with the openness and inclusiveness of visa policy needing to be improved.To solve the above problems,China has successively issued various visa policies to simplify the process.In terms of visas,the visa-free transit policy is a main one.As the visa-free transit policy expands in greater scope and depth,scholars have reached a consensus that the visa-free transit policy can boost inbound tourism.However,they failed to pay attention to the mechanism of the policy effect,resulting in a lack of systematic and in-depth exploration of the internal mechanisms of the policy effect.The paper treats the implementation of the 72-hour visa-free transit policy as a quasi-natural experiment and empirically analyzes the policy's effect on inbound tourism and its underlying mechanism using the multi-point difference-in-difference(DID)and panel data of 57 major tourism cities from 2004 to 2019.The findings are as follows:(1)The implementation of the visa-free transit policy has a double promotion effect on inbound tourism development,which is both prosperous and wealthy.Compared with cities without such a policy,the number of inbound tourists and foreign exchange revenue of cities with the visa-free transit policy increased by 400000 and 1.28 billion yuan on average,with no time lag in tourists number but time lag and intermittency in the revenue.(2)The analysis of the transmission mechanism of visa-free transit policy on the promotion effect of inbound tourism shows that the transmission channel through which the visa-free transit policy exerts its effect is mainly the cost effect rather than the halo effect.The visa-free transit policy reduces the entry cost of tourists,especially those with weak consumption ability,forming a transmission path from cost effect to income.(3)The results of the synergy and moderation analysis show that visa-free transit policy can effectively compensate for the cities'deficiencies in basic conditions such as tourism resources and local reception capacity,as well as supporting scenario characteristics such as the cities'economic dynamics,destination branding,and the degree of goods trade development,thus promoting the development of inbound tourism in these types of cities.Relative to the existing studies,the possible research contributions of this paper are as follows.Firstly,the visa-free transit policy system is incorporated into the framework of inbound tourism flow research,which enriches the theory of inbound tourism demand.This paper further expands and explains the tourism demand theory by sorting out the transmission paths from cost effect to travel consumption and halo effect to travel preference from income and preference in tourism demand theory and reveals the mechanism of policy variables affecting inbound tourism flow under the tourism demand theory system.Secondly,the paper focuses on the applicable conditions of the visa-free transit policy and expands the breadth of existing policy research.Through verifying the effect of the visa-free transit policy,this paper searches for the synergistic conditions and regulatory variables that affect the maximum effect of the visa-free transit policy from the characteristics of the underlying conditions and supporting social scenarios,so as to test the synergistic and regulatory mechanisms of the visa-free transit policy effect and gain an accurate understanding of them.