How Does Sustainable Rural Tourism Cause Rural Community Development?

Rural tourism has been developing vigorously, and rural community functions are becoming diversified in China. Therefore, this paper takes China as an example to explore how sustainable rural tourism affects rural community development in the long and short run over the period 1994–2020. Sustainable rural tourism can be measured using two indicators: total rural tourism revenue and number of rural tourists. Rural community development is measured by the number of rural community service institutions. Then, by incorporating other variables and using the autoregressive distributed lag bounds co-integration technique to perform an empirical analysis, we found that, whether in the long or short run, sustainable rural tourism always plays a positive and significant role in promoting rural community development. In particular, in the long run, rural infrastructure construction, rural ecological environment, agricultural fiscal expenditure, agricultural technological progress, and rural human capital are identified as the major forces behind rural community development. Meanwhile, in the short run, rural infrastructure construction, rural ecological environment, agricultural fiscal expenditure, agricultural technological progress, and rural human capital are also major drivers of rural community development. This paper contributes to the current literature by filling in the existing gaps in several aspects.