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Although tourism has increasingly become an important activity with wide influences on the economic, social, and spatial development of a city, knowledge and interest mostly remain on its industrial performance and promotion. The synergy between tourism and city development is largely overlooked in many cases, resulting in suboptimal design and planning of city tourism activities and unfledged potentials of city development. The aim of the paper is to propose a view of tourism-industrial complex based on a synergistic perspective in order to clarify the systematic characteristics of urban tourism in an integrated, sustainable manner. Availing of bibliometric methods and drawing on city/urban tourism literature, this paper proposes a concept of tourism-industrial complex to cover current complicated and various tourism activities that are embedded in cities at diverse levels regardless of social, economic, and spatial factors. Then, four types of tourism-industrial complexes are proposed, including demand-driven, resource-dependent, externally forced, and hybrid-driven models. Due to the networked connectivity of urban tourism, urban backgrounds, tourism industry, and external circumstances all contribute to a coupling the tourism city development system. The results provide theoretical constructs and policy recommendations for optimization and sustainable city and tourism development.

The world economy has witnessed the proliferation of economic clusters and the growth of transitioning economies. This study attempts to further understand the roles that economic clusters play in the evolving urban economic space in a Chinese transitional city from the perspectives of regional industrial restructuring and urban spatial transformation. An exploratory approach is applied that combines a factor analysis and spatial data analysis to examine the transitioning process of Beijing's spatial-economic development between 1987 and 2002. This was the period when substantial economic and spatial restructuring happened in the city since the transition from a planned economy to a market economy started in 1978. Two spatial-economic models were derived to illustrate this transitioning process from a manufacturing-driven structure to a clustered service-driven structure. The key drivers analyzed include institutional reforms, market economy mechanisms, and global forces. The researchers argue that this cluster approach can advance the theories on transitional urban restructuring as applied to contemporary city development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial parks enjoy significant importance in many countries and regions. This study presents a multi-stage operational process to evaluate the efficiency of parks at each stage using an empirical study of Beijing. The study finds that only three of 22 parks were efficient overall during 2006-2008 and two of 22 were efficient during 2009-2012. The promotion of business, facilitation of production, and rewards of economic returns are highly correlated stages for efficiency performance. The results suggest that Beijing's government should expend more effort developing the potential to generate outputs given current land and investment inputs. In addition, it provides a tool to strengthen the organisational capacity development of industrial parks by emphasising their multi-dimensions in inputs and outputs, selecting the right competitors at the right organisational stage, locating sources of efficiency and inefficiency, and understanding progression and balance of internal stages during operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agriculture in peri-urban areas is prone to dynamic changes due to urban influences. Previous studies have explored the impact of urban growth on peri-urban agriculture (PUA), but the active responses of the agricultural sector are rarely examined. This paper investigates recent agricultural development practices in peri-urban Beijing and explores approaches to agricultural transformation in the rapid process of urbanisation. The investigation finds that high-tech precision agriculture, down-stream processing and agro-tourism have emerged as major forms of PUA in Beijing. It also uncovers that the PUA developments are not only economically appealing, but also socially inclusive and environmental friendly. The findings contribute to a better understanding of PUA progress in China. The paper suggests policy implications in facilitating integrated development between urban and rural sectors, which would help improve economic development, spatial planning and local governance in peri-urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial parks have been tested in various regions around the world, in attempt to foster innovation and fuel economic growth. Despite the importance of industry co-agglomerations in regional growth, few studies examine them in regional geographic space. This paper combines exploratory spatial data analysis and input–output method to explore the spatial pattern of key industrial co-agglomerations in Beijing, which is illustrated by location, function, frequency, spatial hierarchy and spacing. The results contribute to linking abstract economic and actual geographical spaces in urban and regional growth, enabling urban and regional planners to judge and evaluate planning initiatives before and after implementation. The failure of sub-center plans and risks of industrial parks schemes in Beijing are addressed. By considering industrial input–output relations including environmental and human resources, urban planners can optimize the development of such co-agglomerations to foster sustainable urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hotel industry is deeply embedded in local regional conditions, though the influence of regional factors is seldom investigated. Three key hotel industry metrics, Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR), Average Room Rate (ARR), and rooms rented, were examined for their determinants using ordinary least squares and negative binomial regression models on key endogenous and exogenous (regional) factors, including Destination Attractiveness and Capacity, Business and Commercial Environment, Image and Openness, and Tourism Professional Specialization. Using China as a case study, and at different hotel star designations (2- to 5-star hotels), the results show that RevPAR is determined mainly by labor quality and Tourism Professional Specialization. Particularly, regional factors significantly affect ARR and rooms rented. The influence and sophistication of regional factors increases with higher star designations. This paper highlights links between the hospitality industry and regional economic development, which should be considered by both the hotel industry and tourism policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The environmental impact of materials and energy is an important concern when cities and regions produce goods and services. To examine this requires an evaluation tool which can deal with the complex system of resources, energy inputs, products and wastes involved. This paper evaluates the urban material and energy flow efficiencies of 31 cities in China using a combination of the Data Envelopment Analysis model and Principal Component Analysis method. The results show that the urban flow system is composed of several input and output principal components, including energy, materials, urban capital investment, overall output, wastes, and others. In 2010, 16 cities were efficient as judged by the material and energy inputs and outputs. The remaining 15 cities were not efficient, primarily due to product shortfalls and waste excesses. Since 2000, half of the analyzed cities experienced a decline in the urban flow efficiencies, while only six cities showed a positive trend. The reasons include excess inputs of coal, coke, electricity, cement, investment, as well as output shortfalls in terms of overall output, wastes, services, agriculture and transport. We conclude that key priorities for improving urban systems with material and energy flow inefficiency are the use of urban renewable supplies, focus on sustainable endogenous development model, and improvement management of waste output, in order to increase efficiency and sustain economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic clusters have been a central focus of current urban and regional research, policies and practices. However, a methodology to identify and analyze policy-relevant economic cluster dynamics is still not well developed. Based on input-output (I-O) data of 1987, 1992, 1997, 2002 and 2007 of Beijing, this article presents an adapted principle component analysis for identifying the evolution of local economic cluster patterns. This research addresses the changes of economic interaction of industries with complementary and common activities over time. The identified clusters provide an insight into the reality of economic development in a diversifying urban economy: the increasing importance of services and the growing interaction between service and manufacturing industries. Our method therefore provides the analysts with a better understanding of the emergence, disappearance and development of economic clusters citywide. The results could be used to assist monitoring urban economic development and designing more practical urban economic strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the dynamic agglomeration economies through matching channel between human capital agglomeration, regional economic development, and housing prices. Using data from 31 Chinese provinces from 1999 to 2015, it employs a panel vector auto regression model to study the interactive relationships among these factors. Overall, the results show that human capital agglomeration has a positive long-term influence on housing prices and economic development, and has become a determinant of regional economic growth. Housing prices have a negative long-term influence on economic development. However, human capital accumulation responds positively to housing price in regions other than municipalities. These findings suggest that vie for talent through housing policy might not be effective in underdeveloped regions and could lead to misallocation of government fiscal resources. • Relations among human capital, housing price and economic growth are examined by panel VAR model. • Human capital affects regional economic through labor market effects. • Regional economic affects human capital through its agglomeration and matching. • Housing price affects human capital through wealth effects or crowd-out effects. • Housing price affects regional economic through industrial agglomeration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]