Analyzing the impact of high-speed rail on tourism with parametric and non-parametric methods: The case study of China

High-speed rail (HSR) and tourism are closely related activities since improved mobility is perceived to facilitate tourist behavioral changes. The interest in research is very high and this contribution tries to provide an insight into this topic by making a comparison between the estimation of the parametric Generalized Estimating Equation (GEE) approaches with the non-parametric Classification and Regression Tree (CART). A dataset containing information both on tourism and transport for thirty Chinese provinces, during the 2001-2017 period, has been collected. The finding of this paper shows that the presence of HSR has value in the explanation of tourist arrivals.