Coupling Coordination Between Rural Digitalization and Rural Tourism: Evidence from 253 Counties in China

Rural digitalization and rural tourism are important tasks to achieve the goal of rural revitalization strategy, and researching whether there is a connection between them and the degree of association is helpful to accelerate the transformation of rural digitalization and promote the quality and upgrading of rural tourism.This paper constructs an evaluation system of rural digitalization and rural tourism, adopting 253 counties in China as samples to measure the development differences between regions of the two systems.A coupled coordination model is applied to explore the relationship between the two systems and reveals the distribution characteristics of the level of coupling and coordination in China.The findings show that the difference in the overall score of rural digitalization between counties is greater than that of rural tourism industry.There is a high degree of coupling between rural digitalization and rural tourism systems, and the two systems are currently at a barely coordinated stage in China.In addition, the degree of coordination varies significantly between counties, presenting a phenomenon of higher coupling coordination in the eastern coastal region, intermediate in the central and western inland regions, and lower in the northwest.This paper supports and validates some results of rural development projects in the research area to provide theoretical and decision support for coordinating rural digitalization and rural tourism services.