Is the Growth of Tourism-specialised Economies Sustainable? A Case Study of Sanya and Zhangjiajie in China

Despite the relatively high economic growth in tourism-specialised destinations, the long-term sustainability of such growth has rarely been studied. This paper investigates sustainable growth using Sanya and Zhangjiajie as two special cases and applies an accounting growth model to measure the contributions of different input factors and of the total factor productivity to economic growth. The economic growth of Sanya and Zhangjiajie is found to be capital-driven, with small contributions from the labour force and a negative contribution from the total factor productivity, which implies that extensive tourism specialisation cannot promote long-term economic growth.