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Abstract
Policy tourism is an important, widespread, but understudied aspect of the networking efforts of public managers. Few studies have investigated how the official and purposeful interactions between public managers in the context of policy tourism affect collaboration. To fill this gap, this article aims to explore the question: To what extent does policy tourism channel economic collaboration? We argue that leaders’ visit paths provide a direct channel for collaboration through information exchange, trust building, and integration of regional policies, but the consequences vary between jurisdictions at different levels of economic development. We adopt a newly developed nonparametric matching method to estimate the marginal average treatment effects of policy tourism on interprovincial trade flows in China from 2000 to 2013. Results demonstrate that policy tourism channels interprovincial trade flow significantly and that the impacts decrease over time. Also, policy tourism affects interprovincial trade flow more significantly when initiated by less-developed jurisdictions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Notes
1 It is worth noting that relevant research on leaders’ visits spans many fields such as political science, economics, and public administration. Policy tourism is a commonly used terminology in the literature of public administration, describing scheduled trips led by local political actors like provincial/municipal party sectaries, governors, mayors for knowledge sharing and collaboration between subnational governments. Whereas, political visits have been mainly studied in the fields of political science and economics. Heads of state and other national officials would visit other countries with a wider range of diplomatic, ceremonial, and relationship-building motives. This paper is consistent with existing studies of public administration and adopts the term of policy tourism.
2 It is worth noting that in this article, policy tourism refers to the general and whole period of the delegation’s visit to another jurisdiction, including the preliminary communication of intentions, itinerary arrangements, and site visits. Also, policy tourism decisions about where and what to visit are often determined by the preferences of local leaders, implying the role of public managers in collaboration.
3 See Appendix A for the details of the construction of the China Provincial Leadership Visit Database.
4 Note, we must still assume that there are no time-varying unobserved confounders when using Imai and Kim’s (Citation2019) nonparametric matching framework because we still face the foundational tradeoff between time-invariant confounders and causal dynamics. We include a marginal structural model and copula regression model in Appendix B2 to further address issues related to causal dynamics.
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Notes on contributors
Hao Ren
Hao Ren is an assistant professor in the School of Public Administration at Hunan University. His research focuses on the collaborative governance and local governmental behavior.
Lingyi Zhou
Lingyi Zhou is an associate professor in the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University. Her research focuses on collaborative governance, environmental policy and digital governance.
Yuning Gao
Yuning Gao is a tenured associate professor in the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University. His research interests include international economics and international development, environment and resource economics, and policies.