The impact of Wuzhen Theatre Festival on local tourism：A Synthetic Control Method

Abstract

[eng] In China, ancient town tourism is facing severe challenges due to fierce competition and serious homogeneity. With the rapid development of mass tourism in China, how to stand out from the numerous tourist destinations is an urgent problem to be solved for ancient towns. The case study of this paper is Wuzhen. As the most famous ancient town destination in China, the most wellknown activity is the Wuzhen Theatre Festival. Does this event have a substantial economic impact on the local tourism industry? Up to now, few studies have explored the causal effects between small-scale event tourism and local tourism. This paper adopts the Synthetic Control Method to explore the impact of small-scale tourism events on local tourism industry. The case study is based on the Wuzhen Theatre Festival held in Tongxiang, Jiaxing city, Zhejiang Province, China. The results of Synthetic Control Method show that Wuzhen Theatre Festival has significantly increased the tourism revenue in Tongxiang. In contrast, there was no significant impact on the number of tourists.