Is tourism development a catalyst of economic recovery following natural disaster? An analysis of economic resilience and spatial variability

This article constructs one index system of economic resilience, measures the economic resilience index, and investigates whether tourism stimulates economic recovery following the Wenchuan earthquake shock. The empirical results show that the economic resilience index (ERI) using the TOPSIS method presents an increasing trend for all the disaster-affected counties from 2008 to 2016, indicating that the economy in all the counties continues to recover from the Wenchuan earthquake; however, there is a large spatial variability amongst them. Most counties with a tourism-based economic model have lower resilience index but higher average growth rate than those without. The effect of tourism on economic resilience utilizing Quantile regression method shows that the coefficients on tourism specialization vary across the quantiles of the economic resilience index, indicating the existence of a nonlinear tourism-growth nexus.