Abstract:The 16 Prefecture-level cities of Yunnan were taken as the researching subjects, both from the angle of single index or the comprehensive multi-indices, a spatial difference analysis was made of the tourism economy between 2002 and 2012 in Yunnan by use of the Standard Deviation, Coefficient of Variation, Gini Coefficient,Theil index and factor analysis. The results showed that(1)the absolute difference of the tourism economy in Yunnan is found to be ever-increasing and relative difference is narrowing gradually with the international tourism spatial difference being far greater than that of the domestic tourism; the development of tourism economy between different cities is quite uneven.(2)The overall difference of the development of tourism economy is decreasing year by year, the 6 chief research sections made the greatest contribution to the overall difference; the Yunnan Middle and Yunnan Northwest make the greatest contribution to the difference of the 6 research sections; and the internal difference is widening year by year and the development of tourism economy is uneven.(3)the cities with a strong comprehensive strength of the tourism economy in Yunnan all boast their abundant resources, a sound tourism resource, an excellent geographic advantage, a high level of economic development, a rather high economic development and nice infrastructure; and the economization of tourism is quite obvious.