Developing the Tourism Supply Chain for Poverty Alleviation in Rural China

This is an exploratory study of how the supply chain to support tourism can be developed in a developing economy. There are many possible industries the fostering of which can help alleviate poverty in such regions, such as agriculture, textile, light manufacturing, energy, and telecommunication, etc. Tourism is one that would take advantage of some of the natural beauties of developing economies. If done right, it can bring in tourists from other parts of the world with revenue (taxes) to the regions, sales of locally produced goods and services, and employment of the local residents, both of which are means for poverty alleviation. This is an exploratory study because I am not at a stage to develop deep research questions, build analytical models, or conduct meaningful statistical tests to validate hypotheses, etc. I like to find out what are the important elements that one needs to include to understand the supply chain of tourism, the economics potentials and their distribution among the actors, the capacity and the professional skills of people needed, the logistics infrastructure to be developed, the nature of the players involved and their potential differential incentives and interests, and the environmental and social impacts when a region starts having tourists from the outside. To this end, I have identified one such potential region in a remote part of China, and have lined up two students who are willing to help me with field-based exploratory study. The results of this exploration will be the development of a more complete research proposal for more rigorous testing and supply chain model development. Although the exploratory study is on tourism in general, I also have a particular keen interest to see if we can also focus on ecotourism as a start.