Factors influencing the livelihood strategy choices of rural households in tourist destinations

Identifying the influence factors lie behind the livelihood choices of rural households are of crucial significance for improving the sustainable livelihoods of rural households in tourism regions. Five villages in Sa Pa District, Vietnam, were selected in this study, to conduct household surveys and interviews with 180 households. Based on this, a comprehensive approach, which includes multinomial/binary logistic regression, Ripley's function, and geographical detector, is applied to understand the households' capital endowment and factors lie behind their livelihood choices. Results show that for rural households, tourism livelihood yields the highest income, but the lack of diversity of livelihood activities may make tourism livelihood household more vulnerable to the external risk and shocks than balanced livelihood households. Different types of households are found to show clustering feature, with clustering degree ranking as: agricultural > balanced > tourism > labour. Households with more natural capital are less likely to choose livelihoods other than agriculture livelihood. And households with more financial capital are less likely to engage in agricultural livelihood. Both financial capital and social capital can facilitate engagement in balanced livelihood. And financial capital is key to tourism livelihood, and a barrier impeding agricultural households to participate in other livelihood activities.