Tourism development is increasingly linked to both regional economic activity and environmental outcomes. However, empirical evidence remains limited on whether and through which channels proximity to major tourist attractions is associated with the environmental governance of industrial enterprises. Using enterprise-level data and geocoded locations of China’s national 5A tourist attractions in 2014, we examine the relationship between firms’ spatial proximity to 5A attractions and corporate environmental governance. We find that (1) proximity to 5A attractions is positively related to the environmental governance of nearby firms, and the results are robust across alternative specifications and a range of robustness checks, including IV-based estimates; (2) proximity is associated with lower operating costs, consistent with shared transportation infrastructure and environmental facilities, and with higher fixed-asset intensity that is linked to stronger environmental governance; and (3) the positive relationship is more pronounced for natural-landscape attractions and less pronounced in cities with higher innovation or marketization. These findings provide evidence consistent with positive environmental spillovers associated with tourism and underscore the potential value of coordinating tourism development strategies with industrial environmental governance policies.
Xiong et al. (2026) studied this question.