Yuan, J. and Liu, Y., 2020. Evaluation of tourism efficiency in the coastal areas of China in the context of the happiness industry. In: Zheng, C.W.; Wang, Q.; Zhan, C., and Yang, S.B. (eds.), Air-Sea Interaction and Coastal Environments of the Maritime and Polar Silk Roads. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 99, pp. 144–150. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.

As China's tourism industry enters a new era of the happiness industry, tourism livelihood efficiency has become an important basis for testing the development effect of tourism. Based on the perspective of the happiness industry, this paper takes Guangdong Province as an example to evaluate tourism livelihood efficiency in coastal areas. The DEA model and Malmquist model are used to measure tourism livelihood efficiency with the spatial and temporal evolution of 21 cities in Guangdong Province from 2010 to 2017. The results show that the tourism livelihood efficiency of Guangdong Province has reached a good state overall and that tourism development has entered a stage of intensive growth. The evolution of regional tourism efficiency has obvious regional characteristics, with the regional tourism efficiency of the Pearl River Delta being larger than that of eastern Guangdong, the mountainous area and western Guangdong. Based on the status of tourism livelihood efficiency over the years, cities are divided into four types: the strong type, growth type, steady type and stagnation type. Corresponding strategies are proposed based on the characteristics of different regional types.