Abstract: Centering around the efficiency of tourism economic development, this paper adopts the stochastic frontier method (SFA) to conduct an empirical analysis of the tourism economic efficiency level of China’s 31 provincial-level administrative regions (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan) from 2005 to 2014, and at the same time, it integrates the efficiency growth deconstruction method of Kumbhakar and Lovell (2000) to conduct a deconstruction study of the growth rate of TFP. The research findings show that the efficiency of China’s tourism industry has obvious regional heterogeneity characteristics of“Stronger East and Weaker West”. The rate of technological progress and the scale efficiency are the main shortcomings that constrain the growth of total factor productivity in the eastern region of China; the lower rate of technological progress and allocation efficiency are the key factors hindering the improvement of tourism efficiency in the western region. To improve the level of technological production frontier and to optimize the scale structure of the industry will be the key tasks to promote the transformation of the tourism industry towards efficiency in the central region of China.

Key words: tourism economy; efficiency deconstruction; total factor productivity; stochastic frontier analysis