Temporal-spatial measurement and prediction between air environment and inbound tourism: Case of China

Air environment and inbound tourism has intricate interactions so that exploring the relationship of coupling coordination between them is contributory to discover the mutual interaction mechanism. The study firstly constructs a correlation model and an aggregated evaluation system to illustrate the interaction mechanism between these two factors; secondly evaluates the development degrees of both air environment and inbound tourism in China with the combined methods of information entropy weight and the technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution; thirdly analyzes the spatial-temporal differences of the coupling coordination situations between air environment and inbound tourism with the coupling coordination model; fourthly predicts the coupling coordination status of the regions in China with the gray prediction GM(1,1) model. The results show that the development degrees of air environment are more fluctuated than the ones of inbound tourism in China. The coupling coordination statuses are mildly fluctuating and the gaps among regions gradually narrow, while in the next four years the trend will be different: the spatial variations among regions will increase. The contributions include illustrating the interaction mechanism between the two subsystems theoretically, constructing the evaluation system and processing cross-regional spatial-temporal comparisons of the coupling coordination statuses, and predicting the trend of the coordination statuses, which helps to the proposal of more effective and efficient countermeasures.