Despite the recognition of the relationship between technological innovation and tourism development, there is a dearth of rigorous empirical specifications to examine the effect of technological innovation on the latter. With 27 cities of the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration (YRDUA) in China as an empirical case, this study explores whether technological innovation can promote tourism development by using a series of panel regression models. The empirical results indicate that technological innovation has a positive effect on the development of tourism in the YRDUA. With respect to different regions, types of cities, and stages, there are differences in the positive impact of technological innovation on tourism development. Additionally, the impact of different types of technological innovations on tourism development is also diverse.

Tourism plays a crucial role in alleviating poverty deprivations and achieving sustainable development. Nevertheless, there is a lack of literature regarding evaluating poor residents’ perceptions of the impacts of tourism on poverty alleviation from the perspective of multidimensional poverty. Taking Fenghuang County, China, as the study area, this study established an evaluation framework by using the Delphi method based on multidimensional poverty theory. Moreover, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was employed to identify the weight of each indicator and assess poor residents’ perceptions of the impacts of tourism on poverty alleviation. The results indicate that tourism economic development has been a momentous contributor to alleviating multidimensional poverty in study locations to a certain extent (3.180). However, there is still room for improvement and promotion. With respect to various dimensions, the mean of economic level is the highest (1.125), whilst the means of education training (0.420) and health care (0.819) are relatively lower than the other dimensions.