Factors Affecting the Income of Agritourism Operations: Evidence from an Eastern Chinese County

Abstract

Recently, agritourism has developed rapidly, and contributed considerably to economic and cultural revitalization in rural regions across the world. However, it cannot achieve long-term sustainable development if the operators are unable to enjoy necessary economic benefits. Therefore, the primary objective of this study is to identify the factors that affect the net income of agritourism entrepreneurs. Most previous studies have focused on regional or national incomes flowing from agritourism. This study surveyed all (1050) potential agritourism operators in the Luhe District, an eastern Chinese county. Seventy-two of them were identified as agritourism operators. A regression analysis with a best subset variable selection method of the surveyed data shows that the average agritourism income of three years is significantly affected by seven variables of twenty investigated. Some of those factors were also reported on by previous studies while others were new indicators. The findings highlight the importance of locality for local tourism governments when making regulations to promote agritourism. Finally, we provide some policy implications to promote agritourism in small areas (e.g., counties) in an early stage of development, especially in emerging developing economies such as rural China and many other Asian countries.