Does the Digital Economy Promote TourismEco-Efficiency? – An Empirical StudyBased on Chinese Cities

With the rapid development of the digital economy, new concepts, forms, and paradigms are being comprehensively integrated into the entire process of constructing human ecological civilizations, and the development of tourism eco-efficiency has ushered in many new opportunities.This paper constructs a mechanistic framework for calculating the impact of the digital economy on tourism eco-efficiency and pushes for empirical research.This paper uses panel data from 275 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2011 to 2019 as a sample and the benchmark regression model, mediating effect model, and spatial Durbin model to empirically analyze the effect of the digital economy on tourism ecoefficiency after measuring the digital economy and tourism eco-efficiency indexes.The results show that the digital economy has a significant positive effect on tourism eco-efficiency that is more significant in central cities, northeastern cities, and nonurban clusters.Second, the digital economy positively affects tourism eco-efficiency by exerting technological effects and industrial structural adjustments.In addition, the digital economy has a significant positive spatial spillover effect on tourism eco-efficiency.Finally, based on the above findings, this paper proposes specific recommendations for improving tourism eco-efficiency via the digital economy.