Spatial spillover effect of the red tourism policy on public online attention in China: An empirical study based on semantic analysis and spatial econometric model

This paper compares the goals and implementation effects of the red tourism policy, thus helping public policy makers to allocate and optimize tourism resources. Meanwhile, it is of great significance to help market participants to adjust the development and innovation of red tourism products. Specifically, we firstly integrate government service texts and Sina Weibo texts with the theme of "red tourism" as well as relevant statistical data to form a panel dataset of 31 provincial-level regions in China from 2011 to 2019. Then, the text semantic analysis is carried out to identify policy gap. Furthermore, the spatial weight matrices are built from the perspective of policy spatial relevance. Finally, the spatial panel Durbin model is constructed to estimate the spatial spillover effect of red tourism policy on online attention from the perspective of policy spatial correlation. The findings are as follows. (1) The policy gap exists in the development of red tourism to some extent. (2) The public online attention to the red tourism is significantly dependent on geographic and policy space. The main reason for its spillover effect is that government services attach great importance to the goal of spreading the red culture, but the stability of the policy is negatively correlated with the online attention. The unstable competition and cooperation relationship among governments and the low-level steady state of the policy development environment are possible reasons that cause the public to pay less attention to red tourism than expected. (3) Under the effect of geographical and policy spatial correlation, the regional public service capacity presents a positive spillover effect, while the information variables show a negative spillover effect. Strengthening regional cooperation and integration of information service and other elements is the direction of red tourism policy innovation.