Research On The National Economic Atributions And Investment Performance Of High Speed Railway

The construction of high-speed railway has a revolutionary impact on the regional economic, urbanization, and industrial structure upgrading. The high-speed railway has become a new national strategic and emerging industry. As that the transport service of high-speed railway is a quasi-public product, which has significant social and economic benefits, also its potential spillover benefits become more prominent with the network expansion. However, with the rapid development procedures of high-spped rail in China these years, there is not yet formed a unified understanding on some fundamental issues, such as investment performance and risk, enterprise financial benefits, spillover benefits of national economy and urbanization. Hence, it is necessary to study these issues further, thereby contributing to the smooth and continuous development of high-speed railway.This paper, where the high-speed railway is selected as the main object, mainly research on the economic issues from the view of social and economic performance involved in the development process within investment, construction, operation of high-speed railway, then to provide decision support for high-speed rail development. The main works include:(1) Research on the high-speed rail’s national economic infrastructure attributes. Based on the connotation of infrastructure, and combined with the high-speed rail’s new technology characteristics, the infrastructure attributes of high-speed rail were analyzed from the perspective of inherited of convential rail. Conlusions found that high-speed railway is the basical and major infrastructure in national economy, is the results of the development of passenger and freight transport, structural optimization, and rational division of labor, is a national and strategic emerging industry, will have a significant role in promoting social and economic development.(2) Research on the investment performance and risk of high-speed railway. Firstly analizing the investment performance in-depth from the view of social and economic benefits, the development of high-speed rail has obvious social performance on geopolitics, financial security, energy security and other aspects; also has obvious economic benefits in scale economies, scope economies and network economic. Then the investment risk of the rapid development of China’s high-speed railways was analyzed, from the perspective of social risk, technical risk, economic risk and management risk, also some appropriate risk response strategies were proposed.(3) Research on the interaction between high-speed rail and urbanization. The mechanism of interaction of high-speed rail and urbanization was describled form two aspects, the first one is the practical demand of urbanization for high-speed railway, and the second one is the influence of high-speed railway for urbanization. The efficient transport system is the basic requirement of urbanization on the transport capacity and efficiency. Additionly, a discrete weighted Voronoi diagram method was proposed based on the graph theory, using to analyze the impact of high-speed railway for city’s radiation influence on field.(4) Research on enterprise financial benefits. According to the operations management and workflow of China’s high-speed railway, the operating costs and economic accounting model were constructed based on activity-based costing approach, to provide technological method for accounting the enterprise’s financial benefits. Then the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail was applied in a case study, also the sensitivity analysis of tariffs, traffic loads and use time of EMU were analyzed.(5) Research on the high-speed railway’s spillover benefits for national economy. A quantitative model and overflow efficiency indicators were constructed by travel save time, freight capacity improvement. The spillover benefits of Beijing-Shanghai railway were analyzed based on the "with and without" comparison method, in the views of time value saving of travelers, freight capacity improvement of conventional rail, urbanization rate and employment effects.