Urban Agglomeration Policy and Regional Tourism Development

These datasets are merged to construct a city-level panel covering 2004–2019. The sample is processed as follows: (1) all data are harmonized to China’s 2019 administrative divisions; (2) observations with missing values for key variables are removed to form a balanced panel required for spatial estimation; and (3) continuous variables are winsorized at the 1st and 99th percentiles to mitigate extreme values. The final sample contains 195 cities and 3,120 city–year observations. Data are obtained from multiple sources. Urban tourism revenue and tourist arrivals are from the CEIC database. Urban agglomeration policy information is manually compiled from official government documents. Airport data are obtained from the Civil Aviation Administration of China, and information on national 5A scenic attractions is sourced from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China. Climate data on temperature and precipitation come from the China Surface Climate Daily Dataset (V3.0) provided by the National Meteorological Science Data Centre, while PM2.5 data are drawn from the MERRA-2 reanalysis dataset released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Other control variables are mainly obtained from the China City Statistical Yearbook and CEIC.