Does Buddhist Tourism Successfully Result in Local Sustainable Development?

At nine of China’s most well-known Buddhist attractions, the role of Buddhist tourism is examined in terms of two major pillars of local sustainable development, which include local economic growth and local environmental quality. Using the year and city-fixed effect models, and by employing the panel data over the period 2010–2019, we performed an empirical analysis in this investigation. The empirical results suggest that Buddhist tourism positively affects local economic growth. Specifically, a 1% increase in Buddhist tourism results in a 0.053% increase in local economic growth. On the contrary, the empirical results suggest that Buddhist tourism negatively affects local environmental quality. Concretely, a 1% increase in Buddhist tourism leads to a 0.089% decline in local environmental quality. Furthermore, using the number of Buddhist tourists that arrived to replace the total Buddhist tourism revenue to re-estimate the effects of Buddhist tourism on local sustainable development as a robustness test, the new results support the previous results. Meanwhile, other factor with significant impacts on local sustainable development have been found. To conclude, because local economic growth and local environmental conservation are mutually exclusive, which limits local sustainable development, this paper provides evidence for local policymakers to realize local sustainable development from the perspective of Buddhist tourism.