Assessing the impacts of tourism events on city development in China: a perspective of event system

Events boost the economy and generate tourist interest in host cities. Organizations involved in tourism will benefit from understanding how best to implement events which impact host cities’ development. This paper explores the impact on host cities of sponsoring an event portfolio, comprising many different types of events. An empirical study analysed 230 tourism events hosted in mainland China. A multiple regression analysis was performed to test various hypotheses. The findings show that event ‘strength’ (i.e. the level of internationalization, number of participants, and continuity of events) can increase event attractiveness. Consequently, such events promote economic development in host cities. However, levels of government support were found to have negative impacts on host cities’ economies. It is worth mentioning that the duration of tourism events has an inverted U-shaped relationship to economic development. As for spatial distribution of events, we found that locating them in provincial capitals had stronger positive impacts on host cities’ economic development and attractiveness. Marketing strategies are proposed to meet target goals.