High speed rail effects on tourism: Spanish empirical evidence derived from China's modelling experience

• Published in: Journal of transport geography Vol. 57; pp. 44 - 54
• Main Authors: Campa, Juan Luis, López-Lambas, María Eugenia, Guirao, Begoña
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01.12.2016; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: Arrivals; Case studies; Empirical analysis; High speed rail; Indicators; Infrastructure; Tourism; China; Spain
• ISSN: 0966-6923; 1873-1236
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2016.09.012

China and Spain are currently among the top tourist destinations, coming third and fourth place in the 2014 world ranking of tourist arrivals, behind France and the US. Tourism is crucial for the economies of Spain and China, and both countries have the longest high speed rail (HSR) networks in the world. What role has HSR infrastructure played in the development of tourism in both countries? Little research has been done to date, even in Europe, to estimate empirically how tourism indicators are affected by new HSR lines. In 2012 a multivariate panel analysis by Chen and Haynes was applied to 27 Chinese regions, and confirmed that emerging high speed rail services (during the period 1999–2010) had significant positive impacts on boosting tourism in China. No similar empirical tool has ever been tested in Europe. The aim of this paper is to analyse and validate this tool when applied to the Spanish context, and to develop a comparative analysis with the Chinese case study. The methodology is applied to 47 Spanish provinces during the period 1999–2015, and the results clearly reveal a positive but lower-value link (compared to China) between the increase in certain tourism outputs (foreign arrivals and revenues) and HSR network construction. However, further research is needed into the model's limitations, namely the availability of suitable tourism indicators in the official databases, the HSR explanatory variables considered, and the ability to detect “circular cause-effects” between HSR and tourism. •China and Spain both head the rankings for world tourism and HSR length.•The only empirical tool to assess the impacts of HSR on tourism, a multivariate panel analysis, has been applied to China.•This paper aims to analyse and validate this tool when applied to Spain and to compare the results with the Chinese ones.•A positive but lower-value link is shown between some Spanish tourism outputs and the construction of HSR lines.