| Abstract | As an important part of modern service industry, tourism is called the “green” driving force to promote regional economic growth and achieve industrial optimization as well as upgrading. In recent years, local governments have introduced policies aimed at the development of tourism. To strengthen the combination of culture and tourism, invigorate the market an facilitate the transformation and upgrading of the tourism industry, the central government launched pilot reform programs both in 2003 and 2006, which have tremendously promoted the integration of culture industry and tourism industry, and at the same time led to the flourishment of regional tourism. According to the“quasi-natural experiment”of cultural system reform, this paper first applied difference-in-differences model to analyze the panel data of 283 prefecture-level cities in 2002-2003 to evaluate the effect of the reform on regional tourism development. By robust tests, it is found that the reform has a significantly positive effect on domestic tourism income per capita, domestic tourist trips per capita, gross domestic and international tourism income per capita and the total number of domestic and international tourism reception per capita, whereas bears no profound impact on foreign tourism income per capita and reception of oversees tourists per capita. Moreover, cultural system reform has a dynamic effect on the acceleration of the tourism industry. With the advancement of the reform, the enhancement is more obvious. On the one hand, the conclusion provides an important basis for further implementation of the reform at the national level. An open cultural system can not only bring about the prosperity of the cultural industry, but greatly boost regional tourism. On the other hand, this paper provides important implications to the transformation and upgrading of regional cultural industry and tourism industry. |