Previous studies have investigated the determinants of urban tourism development from the various attributes of neighborhood quality. However, traditional methods to assess neighborhood quality are often subjective, costly, and only on a small scale. To fill this research gap, this study applies the recent development in big data of street view images, deep learning algorithms, and image processing technology to assess quantitatively four attributes of neighborhood quality, namely street facilities, architectural landscape, green or ecological environment, and scene visibility. The paper collects more than 7.8 million Baidu SVPs of 232 prefecture-level cities in China and applies deep learning techniques to recognize these images. This paper then tries to examine the influence of neighborhood quality on regional tourism development. Empirical results show that both levels of street facilities and greenery environment promote tourism. However, the construction intensity of the landscape has an inhibitory influence on the development of tourism. The threshold test shows that the intensity of the influence varies with the city’s overall economic level. These conclusions are of great significance for the development of China’s urban construction and tourism economy, and also provide a useful reference for policymakers. The methodological procedure is reduplicative and can be applied to other challenging cases.
Scholars have attempted to compile various multi-region input-output (MRIO) tables for different countries. However, due to city-level data scarcity and methodology constraints, almost no MRIO table covers a large number of cities with more disaggregated sectors in countries with large economies, such as China. Based on two large-scale firm-level datasets, the China Annual Survey of Industrial Firms (CASIF) survey and the China Customs Data (CCD) database, from 2000 to 2013, this paper uses China as a case study and presents a new compilation method to construct an MRIO table covering 284 prefecture-level administrative cities and 334 four-digit sectors, which is by far the most comprehensive MRIO table with the largest number of cities and the most segmented industries in China. Unlike existing MRIO tables constructed based on provincial single-region IO (SRIO) tables, we use information along with various linear constraints implied by sector-level and firm-level statistics. This paper expands on the direct decomposition method by developing auxiliary econometric models necessary for estimations and consistency adjustment. In addition, a comparative analysis shows the reliability of our method, which guarantees better coherence and comparability with the MRIO officially published by the National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS). Therefore, our proposed methodology provides the possibility of producing more disaggregated MRIO tables in other similar contexts.