Expressway Accessibility and Spatial Heterogeneity in Rural Tourism Firm Entry: Evidence from Mountainous Yunnan, China

Abstract Transport infrastructure can enlarge rural market access, but its tourism benefits are unlikely to be evenly distributed across space. This study examines how improvements in expressway-gateway accessibility are associated with tourism-firm entry and how this association varies across villages in mountainous Yunnan, China. We construct a balanced panel of 11,665 rural villages from 2018 to 2025, yielding 93,320 village-year observations. The database integrates annual road networks and expressway gateways, firm-registration records, pre-treatment cultural resources, pre-treatment local organisational and industrial capacity, points of interest, remote-sensing indicators and natural conditions. Network travel-time savings are analysed using village and year fixed-effects models, interaction models and spatial exposure analysis. By 2025, average travel-time savings to the nearest expressway gateway reached 78.22 min. Each 10-min reduction was positively associated with tourism-firm entry (coefficient = 0.0028, SE = 0.0006, p < 0.001), with stronger responses in accommodation and catering. The association was stronger in villages with richer cultural resources and greater pre-existing local capacity, whereas county-seat accessibility showed a different pattern. Spatially, the clearest firm-entry response occurred in villages experiencing direct accessibility improvements. These findings suggest that accessibility gains create spatially selective rural tourism opportunities. Transport policy should therefore be coordinated with cultural-resource development, local capacity building and cross-village corridor planning.