Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining: Protection and Development of World Heritage Sites

The production of services and goods needs consumption of available material and energy. An economy often focuses on sources of high-quality material/energy first produced by nature for increasing growth. World heritages sites (WHSs) have become major tourist attractions that promote economic development for developing countries. The increased number of tourists has thus brought about threats to ecological environment. Scholars stress that it should be sustainable or “green growth†since it comes to economic growth currently. The aim of this research is to establish a sustainable development model for WHSs to empirically investigate the dilemma between economic development and ecological protection with particular emphasis on strategies that promote the sustainability. The study took China’s 45 WHSs as samples and constructed a two-stage sustainable development model to analyze the trade-off between economic development and ecological protection. The dynamic network slacks-based measure was employed for dynamic performance evaluation for the period 2013-2019. The results suggest that a strong balance between economic development and ecological protection would be essential for sustainability. Spearman’s rank correlation was also used to verify that there are no conflicts between the two processes. In addition, this study demonstrates that an effective government policy covering regulations of economic development and ecological protection can positively influence sustainable development. The governments are suggested to improve the section that the WHS performs inefficient. Involvement of balanceable sustainable development for WHSs needs necessary cooperation during concerned institutions, practitioners, and communities. The WHSs are recommended to receive strict standard of supervision, management, and control.