The evaluation of tourism industry efficiency in Hubei province based on three-stage DEA

Abstract

In this paper, the three-stage DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) model is used to estimate and evaluate the tourism efficiency of 12 major prefecture-level cities in Hubei province from 2008 to 2018. The results show that: the environment variables had a significant impact on the tourism development efficiency of Hubei province. The stochastic noise and environment effects make most cities' pure technical efficiency being underestimated and scale efficiency being overestimated. After eliminating environment effects and stochastic noise the integrated technical efficiency of Hubei province's tourism is low and still has a big development space. Scale efficiency is the main reason causing low integrated technical efficiency. The returns to scale in some cities change from decreasing to increasing, which shows that the environment factors result in the declining of returns to scale. The overall pure technical efficiency of Hubei province is high and close to the efficiency frontier, but some cities' pure technological efficiencies aren't stable. They need to strengthen tourism products innovation, scientific management level and professional quality of practitioners, keeping the pure technological efficiency at a high level. The tourism industry of 12 prefecture-level cities in Hubei province can be divided into three types. The strategies of improving the efficiency of different cities' tourism industry are put forward based on the regional efficiency structure characteristics.