Using DEA Method to Measure and Evaluate Tourism Efficiency of Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan Provinces in the South of China - A case of the Beibu Gulf Urban Agglomeration-

China's "One Belt and One Road" initiative has brought multiple opportunities to the development of tourism in Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan provinces and the implementation of the Beibu Gulf Urban Agglomeration Development Plan has set clear goals for further accelerating the coordinated development, in-depth cooperation of the three. This study takes the Beibu Gulf Urban Agglomeration as the research object and utilized the data envelopment analysis (DEA) procedure to estimate the technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency, and scale efficiency scores for each city and Malmquist index was subsequently used to analyze dynamically, then tries to offer an adequate inclusion of sustainable factors in overall tourism development efficiency results through the detection and estimation of potential sources of efficiency. In order to complete the task, data collection was focused on Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan provinces of China over the period from 2016 to 2018. The results in the first phase show relatively high efficiency scores, particularly in the case of the Beibu Gulf Urban Agglomeration and with room for improvement in the case of other cities of Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan provinces. The second stage results present several aspects that should be carefully considered in order to analysis tourism efficiency of the Beibu Gulf Urban Agglomerations vertically according to the changes of the frontier.