Spatial matching relationship between health tourism destinations and population aging in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration

In order to address population aging and the healthy China strategy, this paper takes three provinces and one city in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration as the empirical target. Firstly, using the 2010 and 2020 census data, and taking the aging coefficient and the density of the elderly population as the basic research indexes, this paper adopts the center of gravity migration model and the standard deviation ellipse to outline the spatial evolution path of the aging coefficient and the density of the elderly population. Second, using the data of recreational tourism sites in each prefecture-level city of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration from 2016 to 2022, the closest neighbor index is used to judge the overall distribution characteristics of recreational tourism sites, and the judgment results are further verified with the help of Tyson polygonal analysis. Finally, based on the cross-section data of the elderly population in 2020, the spatial distribution of recreation and tourism sites and the elderly population are matched by the geographic concentration index, the center of gravity model and the matching coefficient. The results show that (1) the degree of population aging is deepening, and the characteristics of spatial Agglomeration are obvious, but the development speed among regions is inconsistent; (2) the distribution of health tourism destinations is wide and uneven between regions, showing the characteristics of ‘overall dispersion and local concentration’; (3) the spatial distribution of health tourism destinations and the elderly population shows a certain matching relationship, but the matching degree is not high. With the Yangtze River as the boundary, the distribution of health tourism destinations is ‘high in the south and low in the north’ and assumes a ladder shape from south to north, with obvious regional differences. Overall, health tourism lags behind the development process of aging