On Rural Collective Economy and Rural Green Tourism

Introduction

For a long time, the multiplier effect brought by the development of tourism industry has undoubtedly brought unlimited impetus to the development of rural tourism. But in recent years, behind the rapid growth of rural tourism, resources and environment are under great pressure, farmers' sustainable income grow weakly, and the coexistence of oversupply and undersupply is worrisome. How to make rural tourism develop in an environment-friendly way and transform from extensive expansion to intensive development? China's rural collective economy will generate an important impact to rural green tourism.

Amartya (1966) demonstrated that in agricultural labor, the enthusiasm of cooperative labor is higher than that of individual labor. Since then, a large number of literatures studying the relationship between collective economy and labor incentive from multiple perspectives have emerged. Reasons explained by the collective economy on the appearance of labor incentives can be summarized as five aspects, that is, management system, interest distribution mechanism, equity theory, environmental preference changes and changes in property rights (Mancur & Lloyd, 1971).

Specifically, in the industry study, collective economic theory and empirical study are basically disposed in the following two ways: first, to add information asymmetry variables to the utility function of representative industry; for example, Munshi and Natasha (2006) believe that where time and macro environment remain uncertain, industry stakeholders may have moral hazard conflict of the common faith out of their respective interests, yet the way of collective economy is conducive for industry stakeholders to have synergistic effect, as well as to the promotion of long-term interests. Second, give full consideration to time span and build more complex and comprehensive research framework; for example, Castriota and Stefano (2015) uses dynamic panel data to analyze and verify the nonlinear relationship between the scale of industry and the collective behavior under time span.

Among studies on the relationship between the collective economy and rural tourism industry, more of the studies use case study. For example, Lin (1993) points out that for the long-term discussion of China's economy on the collective economy, the key to get out of the prisoner's dilemma lies in the collective motivation, which is particularly important. Through qualitative case study, Trejos and Bernardo (2009) comes to the conclusion that the development of community-based rural tourism by collective property is conducive to the promotion of rural residents’ welfare, and can have more public services and products provided to rural residents. Kayat and Kalsom (2013) conducts a sample survey on 47 rural communities to investigate the difference of individual behaviors and collective behaviors, seeks the perception of different economic organizations on residents in tourist destinations, believes that individual behaviors only meet individual needs and collective behaviors meet public needs, and demonstrates by data analysis that collective behavior is better for residents. Through the long-term follow-up investigation on residents in rural tourism destinations, Amsden, BenoniL & Stedman (2011) analyzes that collective action is conducive to the promotion of innovative ability of rural tourism development, may enhance the sharing function of information carrier, and help residents to meet the demand of daily life. Therefore, under such research method and theoretical analysis framework, depicting promotion of rural tourism happiness index by rural residents’ welfare level, as well as the development mechanism of gradual accumulation of collective behavior influencing the development of rural tourism, and considering the promotion of collective economy and rural tourism happiness index, is one of the research contents of this article.

Most of above-mentioned literatures make a comparative qualitative analysis on the interests of rural tourism residents brought by collective behaviors, and quantitative analyses are relatively less. However, with the great short-term interests brought about by rural tourism becoming the focus, the cost and benefits of resource-plunging development of rural tourism is urgently needed to be explored with mathematical models. Therefore, this paper will carry out a theoretical model analysis of the collective economy and the development of rural green tourism and conduct an empirical test in combination with the evaluation index of rural green tourism.