High-quality tourism development and ecological environment in ethnic regions: empirical evidence from 39 prefecture-level cities of Guangxi, Yunnan, and Guizhou

Abstract

Against the strategic background of building a Beautiful China and promoting common prosperity, this paper adopts panel data covering 39 prefecture-level cities in Guangxi, Yunnan and Guizhou from 2013 to 2024. The vertical-horizontal scatter degree method, ArcGIS spatial visualization, two-way fixed-effect models, system GMM, and Random Forest algorithms are employed to analyze their spatiotemporal evolution, nonlinear nexus, and underlying transmission channels. The empirical results show that: First, high-quality tourism development exerts an inverted-U shaped nonlinear influence on regional ecological environment, with the inflection point statistically estimated at approximately 0.4481, which receives consistent directional reference after endogeneity correction. Second, the ecological improvement effect presents prominent heterogeneous characteristics: from a provincial perspective, Yunnan with a mature industrial system boasts stronger positive environmental spillover; for industrial features, late-developing cities less reliant on traditional mass tourist reception face lower transition costs toward green tourism formats; additionally, such beneficial effect is not restricted by the initial endowment threshold of natural capital stock. Third, the mechanism test verifies narrowing the urban-rural income gap acts as a core coordination channel: high-quality tourism transformation optimizes the income distribution of rural residents and alleviates survival-driven ecological degradation across ecologically fragile zones; by contrast, simple expansion of aggregate macro consumption fails to generate tangible ecological dividends. This research provides empirical references for balancing economic advancement and eco-conservation in ecologically vulnerable southwest ethnic areas.