Abstract In the new era, it is of urgent importance to improve the efficiency of tourism industry to tackle its unbalanced and insufficient development, to implement the tourism economic transformation and to promote both its quality and efficiency. This paper selects Henan province as case study area and employs DEA and ESDA models to explore the characteristics and pattern of spatial evolution in underdeveloped areas. The results show that firstly, the tourism industry efficiency of Henan demonstrates a rising characteristic in recent years, but when analyzed from the perspective of decomposed efficiency, the promotion of total efficiency manly relies on the expansion of scale efficiency rather than technical efficiency. Secondly, the space-time evolution is significant in tourism efficiency of different regions. High-value areas increase progressively in number and are gradually grouped in the belt area along the Yellow River and the Tai-hang Mountain while low-value areas decrease and are distributed sporadically in central and eastern Henan. Finally, the spatial pattern of tourism efficiency of Henan province shows a transformation from random and dispersed distribution to geographic concentration as well as a gradient disparity from northwest to southeast. Based on this, the paper discusses the countermeasures and suggestions on how to improve regional tourism efficiency of different geographic regions so as to achieve the symbiotic development of regional tourism through classified guidance and macro-control.
2019, Vol. 36 
