Abstract: At present, the level of urban aging in China has been accelerating, while the tourism consumption of the elderly population is increasing year by year. Tourism has become an important way to improve old people′s quality of life. An empirical study has been completed by using the related time series data from 1994 to 2013 and a VAR (Vector Autoregressive) model is constructed based on reflecting the dynamic relationship between urban aging and the domestic tourism consumption level. Based on VAR model, with impulse response function and variance decomposition analysis, this paper analyzes the dynamic effects of the urban aging on the domestic tourism. The cumulative effect of urban aging on domestic tourists trips arrivals is greater than the cumulative effect of the total cost of domestic tourism, indicating that there is a significant long-term stable positive relationship between urban aging and domestic tourists trips arrivals, but the long-term relationship between urban aging and the total domestic tourism spending is not significant; the aging of urban population plays an important role in the predictive variance of domestic tourist arrivals, but the aging of the urban population is relatively small in the variance of the prediction of the total cost of domestic tourism.

Key words: urban aging, domestic tourism consumption, VAR model, impulse response analysis, variance decomposition