Study On The Influence Of Transportation On Market Scale

The economic theory has attention to transportation status and significance in economic growth all the time, but the mainstream economics pays close attention to market transaction behavior itself, ignoring the spatial dimension in the process of market transaction and the influence of transportation. In the theory of economic growth based on mainstream economics, whether it is "accumulation of Capital", "technological innovation’ or ’institutionalism theory", there is a common feature of the assumption that transportation conditions remain unchanged. Transportation role in the economic growth seems to have been in dispensable situation. But modern market fully shows the distinctive feature of crossing time and crossing regions; there is no doubt that transportation plays an important role. Therefore, the paper tries to introduce transportation cost to the general model of supply and demand, and to explore economic status and significance of transportation based on market scale.The paper depicts market scale with three dimensions according to the Smith division growth theory on the basis of the review of previous studies. As a breakthrough point, the paper tries to introduce transportation cost to the general model of supply and demand, and establish a relationship framework between transportation and market scale, and to reflect the effect of transportation on market scale fully. In empirical study, the paper takes the water transport and railway transport development as an example in America, reviewing and summarizing the history of the U.S to get further evidence that the relationship between transportation and market scale. Combined with China’s rapid economic growth over the past 30 years, transportation development in rapid economic growth and market scale expanded plays an important role. The paper further mainly discusses the container transport in the past 30 years in our country to establish export-oriented economy mode and the significant influence in the process of market expansion. Finally the paper thinks that the vulgar transportation development mode hinders reduce transportation costs, and points the problem that the large-scale development of high-speed rail in the mid-west region.In this paper, the conclusion and the innovation points are as follows:Firstly, the paper defines market scale which is defined to the ability of market effective demand, and makes use of three dimensions to depict market scale including population scale, trade barriers, and transportation. Market is different from market radius and sales scale. The market radius is covering the geographical scope of the market, and the sales scale refers to the growth of enterprise sales. Market radius expansion and the company sales increase helps to expand market scale.Secondly, the paper establishes a framework relationship between transportation and market scale, and fully discusses the effect of transportation on market scale. The paper make transportation divides into traffic facilities and transportation technology, and thinks that transportation development refers to the transport infrastructure investment and transportation technology innovation. Transport infrastructure investment is conducive to ascension, increase population scale, promote the deepening of division of area, help to improve the productivity of enterprise and promote the market purchasing power; Transportation technology innovation can reduce transportation costs as well as expand market radius, not only increase population scale, but reduce the influence of information costs and coordination costs significantly.Thirdly, transportation discussed from the angle of market scale in China’s economic growth "miracle" in the important role. Over the past 30 years China’s rapid economic growth is the miracle and the transportation plays a major role and especially the development of the external-oriented economy in the large-scale application of container transportation is conducive to China’s enterprises to increase sales and increase people’s incomes, so as to realize the domestic market scale expansion and rapid economic growth significantly. Furtherly, with the deepening of China’s economic transformation, the vulgar transportation development models is not conducive to reduce transport costs and is apt to form high transportation cost. In addition, the high cost of high-speed rail itself and continuing operations required by the regional economic condition, and the paper thinks that the present large-scale construction of high-speed rail in the Midwest can increase the government financial pressure and people’s burden, unable to further reduce transportation cost and expand market scale, so the paper suggests that the relevant departments need to be reviewed.The paper contains 35 figures,22 tables,152 references.