Abstract:

Tourism is acknowledged as one of the effective means to balance interregional economic disparity.But the regional tourism economic disparity is often evident because of the tourism resource endowment,transportation,economic development and location.The tourism industry can promote regional economic development,but sometimes may lead to increased regional disparity.Taken 13 cities of Jiangsu Province as examples,the paper used the coefficient of variation,Theil index and Nich index to analyze the overall regional disparity,internal structure and spatial pattern of domestic tourism in Jiangsu province.The Theil coefficient can be decomposed multiply,to measure the temporal changes of interregional and intraregional disparity of domestic tourism economy in Jiangsu.
The result indicated that the overall regional disparity was getting larger from 1999 to 2005,and then fell down.Interregional disparity was larger than that of intraregional disparity.Interregional disparity was the main contributor to the regional disparity of domestic tourism economy.Disparities among South Jiangsu,Middle Jiangsu and North Jiangsu composed the spatial pattern of regional disparity of domestic economy.The development of domestic tourism showed obvious southnorth gradient difference.According to the domestic tourism income of every cities and the ratio of the average level of Jiangsu,the development of domestic tourism was divided into three gradients.The three gradients were high level development zone,medium level development zone and low level development zone.The spatial pattern of the development speed of domestic tourism in Jiangsu was similar to that of the development level.Those cities with high development level of domestic tourism also had high development speed,and the relatively backward areas had low speed.The “Matthew effect” was obviously evident. The contrast analysis of 1999 and 2010 showed that,the spatial pattern of domestic tourism development in Jiangsu did not change radically.The imbalance of tourism economy was significant and showed obvious differentiation among South Jiangsu,Middle Jiangsu and North Jiangsu.Cites in South Jiangsu were belonged to the high level or medium level area.Most of the cities in Middle Jiangsu and North Jiangsu were relatively backward.
Finally,some suggestions to promote the coordinated development of domestic tourism in Jiangsu were put forward. For the Middle Jiangsu and North Jiangsu,it is important to strengthen policy supporting and to promote the domestic tourism economy.The South Jiangsu should strengthen the internal cooperation,promote the domestic tourism to high level equalization development,strengthen its influence in domestic and international and become a golden tourism area.The ultimate goal of tourism development in Jiangsu is to narrow the regional disparity and promote the overall level of tourism economy