Social Tourism and Healthy Ageing

Recent research in social tourism notes possible links between tourism participation and improvements in health. However, there is a lack of quantitative evidence concerning the potential links between tourism participation and self‐reported health amongst older people. An ageing society requires measures to promote independent living and enhance older people's quality of life. This paper provides evidence that older tourists are more active and healthy than non‐tourists, from a study comparing health perceptions amongst Spanish older people. The results provide tentative conclusions of causal relationships between tourism and dimensions of physical and mental health through a Structural Equation Model. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Policy support and emerging farmer professional cooperatives in rural China

Most farms in China are small and vulnerable to the forces of powerful markets. Recognizing the challenges of small farming, China has promoted farmer professional cooperatives (FPCs) during the past two decades. The overall goal of this study is to analyze the emergence and current status of FPCs, the nature of recent policy initiatives and the role of government policies that have played in promoting recent trends. Based on a unique panel data from two rounds of national representative surveys of 380 villages in 2003 and 2009, this paper shows that while there was nearly no FPC in late 1990s, there were FPCs in 21% of China's villages and these FPCs provided services to about 24 million farm households in 2008. The determinants of FPC analysis show that the role of the government is of primary importance. Policy support measures and, most likely, the new legal setting in China after the passage of the 2006 FPC law, account for most of the growth of FPCs.     

Applying experiential marketing in selling tourism dreams

Experiential marketing is effective in influencing tourist behaviour because pleasure tourists travel in pursuit of fantasies and positive emotions. The influences of experiential marketing on tourist behaviour depends on tourist imagery processing (i.e. the mental system involved in processing experiential stimuli). This theme has recently attracted the attention of tourism academics, but it lacks guidance for researchers to navigate the dense, complex literature. Hence, this paper aims to provide a theoretically based review of imagery processing research in tourism. The systematic quantitative literature review method is applied to select and analyse 70 relevant papers published in the period from 1997 to 2017. In doing so, this review reconciles imagery-related concepts such as mental simulation, consumption vision, narrative transportation, telepresence, imagination, fantasy and memory recall. Moreover, a general framework of tourist behaviour is developed to explain how experiential marketing influences tourist behaviour by means of mental processes. This paper suggests different ways to apply experiential marketing in managing tourist experiences. Also, it highlights the necessity of customising experiential marketing initiatives to target different tourist segments.     

Sustainability and marketing in tourism: its contexts,paradoxes, approaches,challenges and potential

ABSTRACT

Tourism marketing has typically been seen as exploitative and fuelling hedonistic consumerism. Sustainability marketing can, however, use marketing skills and techniques to good purpose, by understanding market needs, designing more sustainable products and identifying more persuasive methods of communication to bring behavioural change. This article summarises the latest research on the theories, methods and results of marketing that seeks to make tourist destinations better places to live in, and better places to visit. It explores sustainability marketing's two fundamental approaches, that of market development, using market segmentation, and that of sustainable product development. It introduces a Special Issue of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism on sustainable marketing, sharing evidence on the motivations, mechanisms and barriers that businesses encounter, and on successes in changing consumer behaviour and pursuing sustainability goals. Particular attention is given to the methodologies of sustainable tourism marketing, to the subject's breadth and complexity, and to its many innovations. Further research is called for to fully understand what contextual aspects influence these pro-sustainability interventions to achieve which outcomes in other settings, in order to validate some of the exploratory studies discussed, and establish the feasibility of scaling up pilot studies for more general use.     

The impact of climate change on China's agriculture

This article examines how expected changes in climate are likely to affect agriculture in China. The effects of temperature and precipitation on net crop revenues are analyzed using cross-sectional data consisting of both rainfed and irrigated farms. Based on survey data from 8,405 households across 28 provinces, the results suggest that global warming is likely to be harmful to rainfed farms but beneficial to irrigated farms. The net impacts will be only mildly harmful at first, but the damages will grow over time. The impacts also vary by region. Farms in the Southeast will only be mildly affected but farms in the Northeast and Northwest will bear the largest damages. However, the study does not capture the indirect effects on farms of possible changes in water flow, which may be important in China.