Abstract
Rural tourism development has made positive contributions to promoting an increase in farmers' income, coordinated urban-rural development, rural civilization, and industrial transformation & upgrading. However, it also faces problems such as immature development and unsound planning. This paper focuses on the development status of the public-private partnership (PPP) models in rural tourism projects of Shandong Province in China, as well as their operations and cooperation models. Then, this paper assesses the impacts of PPP models on the rural tourism industry of Shandong Province, and appraises their performance by combining standard data envelopment analysis (DEA) and super-DEA models. The main findings are (1) The overall efficiency of PPP models in rural tourism projects of Shandong Province is moderate, and resource utilization is disproportionate to output, leaving great room for improvement. (2) PPP models in Larger projects with more complexity, are more easily tending to a lower overall efficiency. (3) The optimal development PPP model for rural tourism projects of Shandong Province is "Stock Project + Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model". In response to these findings, this paper gives some targeted opinions and suggestions, including strengthening government supervision, controlling project scale, incentivizing enterprises to play intermediary roles, and innovating PPP models. In this way, it provides strong academic support and useful policy suggestions for the sustainable development of PPP models in worldwide rural tourism.