The Coupling Coordination Relationship and Driving Factors of the Digital Economy and High-Quality Development of Rural Tourism: Insights from Chinese Experience Data

Globally, rural tourism development faces challenges such as inadequate infrastructure, insufficient marketing resources, and unreliable service quality, all of which limit its potential. However, digital technology offers unprecedented opportunities to address these barriers. China’s experience in integrating digital technology into rural tourism provides a valuable case study for understanding the digitalization of rural tourism. This study constructs an index system to assess the coupling coordination relationship between the digital economy and the high-quality development of rural tourism (HQDRT). By employing methods such as the entropy method, coupling coordination degree model, obstacle factor model, and geographic detector, the study examines the evolution of this coupling coordination relationship and its driving mechanisms across 31 provinces (including regions and municipalities) in China from 2012 to 2021. The findings reveal that (1) The development of the digital economy generally lags behind that of the rural tourism, but the coupling coordination relationship between the two is steadily improving. (2) The level of coupling coordination increases from west to east, with spatial distribution patterns evolving from ‘antagonism’ to ‘adaptation’ and then to ‘coordination’ as they move eastward. Most provinces belong to the ‘adaptation’ type. (3) From a nationwide perspective, the primary obstacles impeding the development of the digital economy include an insufficient internet penetration rate, which consequently leads to underdeveloped internet finance development and telecommunications industry development. The major barriers to the HQDRT stem from an inadequate number of tourists and a lack of physical infrastructure. (4) Population density, consumer spending, and R&D are significant drivers of the coupling coordination relationship, with the interaction between urbanization rates and other factors generally weakening the degree of coupling.