Understanding the relationship between tourism and regional income inequality: does digital economy development matter?
研究揭示数字经济如何改变旅游业对区域收入不平等的影响：当数字经济发展超过某个门槛，旅游业从缩小收入差距转为扩大差距，空间溢出效应也从辐射转为虹吸。
Tourism has long been regarded, both in theory and policy, as a potential instrument for alleviating regional income inequality. However, in the context of rapid digital economy development, its actual distributional effects have increasingly exhibited conditional dependence, necessitating the incorporation of digital contexts into theoretical frameworks. To this end, this study develops a nonlinear integrated analytical framework embedded within the digital economy, systematically elucidating how the digital economy reshapes tourism’s impact on regional income inequality and its underlying mechanisms through spatial threshold effects. Using China’s city-level balanced panel data and a spatial threshold model, the findings reveal that as digital economy development crosses a specific threshold, tourism’s direct effect on regional income inequality shifts from mitigating to exacerbating inequality, and its spatial spillover effect transitions from a radiation effect to a siphoning effect, demonstrating pronounced spatial threshold characteristics. This structural transformation is primarily driven by the widening of the second-level digital divide (i.e. disparities in digital literacy and usage capabilities), while enhanced higher-level digital competencies (particularly digital application capabilities) further intensify this process. These findings provide theoretical foundations and policy implications for addressing the growing interregional divergence in tourism-derived benefits induced by digital divides in the digital era.