Dynamic assessment of tourism carrying capacity and its impacts on tourism economic growth in urban tourism destinations in China

Abstract For urban areas, Tourism Carrying Capacity (TCC) can be defined as the abilities of a destination to absorb and manage increasing tourism activities without a degradation in the tourism sector of the urban economy. To optimize the concept and assessment of TCC, this paper develops a dynamic carrying capacity model including three subsystems and 47 variables by System Dynamic (SD) method from a macroscopic perspective. Taking the top nine urban tourism destinations in China as the objects of the study, we compare how government investments in tourism resource, environmental protection, economy and infrastructure impact tourism growth through four scenarios. The results indicate that environment scenario simulation contributes to both TCC and tourism economic growth; the economic scenario simulation can increase the overall TCC, but harms to tourism economic growth compared with other scenarios; the resource scenario simulation has no significant change in TCC compared with the current scenario. The results suggest that to promote sustainable tourism development, TCC management should focus on environmental and tourists management policies, such as external environment improvement, behaviour rules and ecological concept establishment in personal daily life.