High speed rail effects on tourism: Spanish empirical evidence derived from China's modelling experience

The aim of this paper is to analyse and validate this tool when applied to the Spanish context, and to develop a comparative analysis with the Chinese case study. The methodology is applied to 47 Spanish provinces during the period 1999-2015, and the results clearly reveal a positive but lower-value link (compared to China) between the increase in certain tourism outputs (foreign arrivals and revenues) and HSR network construction. However, further research is needed into the model's limitations, namely the availability of suitable tourism indicators in the official databases, the HSR explanatory variables considered, and the ability to detect “circular cause-effects” between HSR and tourism.