CAO Fangdong, HUANG Zhenfang, YU Fenglong, WU Limin
By using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method, this paper first comprehensively measures and calculates the tourism efficiency of China's National Scenic Areas. Then, methods of Standard Deviation Ellipse and Barycentric Coordinates are adopted for exploring how the gravity centers of travel efficiency of China's National Scenic Areas evolves and for analyzing the important factors which affect the evolution path and its mechanism. Results are shown as follows: (1) Generally, the tourism efficiency of China's National Scenic Areas is not high, with a comparatively low variation. The comprehensive efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency are characterized by obvious fluctuation, which illustrates, in the early stage of the reform and opening up, that the tourism development of scenic areas benefited from scale-investment and effective monetary capital investment is the main measure to promote tourism development. In addition, the average efficiency value shows an overall decline, which indicateds most scenic areas are in a state of inefficiency, lack of DEA optimum state so that the production unit of scenic areas shows certain resources redundancy and inefficient development. (2) Viewed from the distribution of the gravity centers on the whole, they are mainly located between 107°11'E-118°37'E and 29°02'N-38°55'N, an east-west span of about 11° and south-north span of about 9°; seen from the evolution of travel efficiency gravity centers, the comprehensive efficiency varies the most, but on the whole the paths all change from west by south first to east by north, then back to west by south. Meanwhile, the trend of east by north of the gravity centers of the scale efficiency and total factor productivity are relatively small, while the trends of the comprehensive efficiency and pure technical efficiency change greatly.(3) By analyzing the evolution driving mechanism of spatial layout of scenic areas travel efficiency, we can find out that the level of economic development, resources endowment, industrial structure, transportation development, information technology and system supply are the important factors which affect the gravity centers shift of the travel efficiency, and these factors promote the dynamic evolution of spatial pattern of the travel efficiency. Through optimizing the industrial structure, introducing advanced technology, making perfection of the market mechanism, scientific government regulation and improvement of resources endowment, we can effectively raise the travel efficiency of scenic areas.