Does rural sports tourism promote the sustainable development of the destination? -- Based on quasi-experimental evidence of sports and leisure towns in China

Abstract

Sustainable development is an important tool to realize the sound economic, social, and ecological operation of the destination, and rural sports tourism is an important way to realize the sustainable development of the destination by relying on its own industrial advantages. This paper systematically explains the causal relationship between rural sports tourism and destination sustainable development by constructing a "Driving Force-State-Response" model (DSR). Based on the panel data of 290 prefecture-level cities in China from 2011 to 2022, this paper adopts the quasi-natural experiment of "sports and leisure characteristic towns in China" (SLT) to construct a difference-in-differences model and empirically evaluate the mechanism of rural sports tourism and sustainable development of destinations. The results show that: (1) the development of rural sports tourism is conducive to promoting the overall sustainable development of the destination, and the effect is more significant in the western and eastern regions. This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests; (2) Mechanism analysis found that rural sports tourism promoted the optimization of industrial structure, residents' values, infrastructure construction, and grassroots governance efficiency, and thus promoted the sustainable development of destinations. Finally, other areas of concern for future rural sports tourism research are proposed.