Green innovation efficiency of China's tourism industry from the perspective of shared inputs: Dynamic evolution and combination improvement paths

Abstract

For the high-quality development of China's tourism industry, improving the tourism green innovation efficiency (GIE) to promote the green development of tourism from the perspective of technological innovation is essential. However, the level of development and specific promotion path of tourism GIE in China's provinces remains unknown, which this study attempts to determine. GIE has two stages: research and development (R&D) and achievement conversion. A two-stage relational data envelopment analysis model with shared inputs was used to evaluate the efficiencies of these two stages in tourism in 30 Chinese provinces during 2002–2017; and according to the relationship between these two efficiencies; tourism GIE was divided into four types: low/high green R&D and low/high achievement conversion. Furthermore, fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis was used to design combination improvement paths of China's tourism GIE. The results show that: (1) western provinces outperformed eastern ones in green R&D and the opposite was true for green achievement conversion; (2) 30% of the provinces were in the low/low, 50% in the low/high, and 20% in the high/high stages; (3) combination improvement paths were either in the technology or non-technology path. The results of this study can provide a reasonable reference for the Chinese government to build a high-quality tourism development pathway from the perspective of green technology. Due to the lack of statistical data for China's tourism industry, this study was limited to using only the number of patent applications as an output indicator when measuring the tourism green R&D efficiency, thus the resulting selection of indicators was less comprehensive than expected.

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