High-speed Railways And The Development Of Regional Economy In China

Rapid high-speed rail(HSR)development in the last decade has greatly promoted China's economic growth and social changes,as the operation of HSR has critically suppressed time and space,accelerated the flows of production factors and greatly improved social productivity.Besides,HSR has raised the efficiency and scale of social fixed asset investment throughout the country.Under the economic “new normal”,the construction of HSR is an important physical impetus for the Chinese economy to sustain its steady growth and regional economic convergence.This study explains why HSR construction not only contributes to faster economic growth but also promotes regional economic convergence,facilitating China to sustain its long-term economic growth.We first construct a theoretical model to explain this economic phenomenon,and then establish an empirical model to testify two hypotheses: the first one is that HSR promotes economic growth for all the cities;the second one is that HSR accelerates economic convergence among the cities.This study is divided into seven main parts.(1)The introduction explains the background and significance,goals and ideas,assumptions and methods,characteristics and innovations of this research.(2)Review the literatures from the four aspects of regional economic growth and convergence in China,infrastructure and economic development,railway and economic development,high-speed rail and economic development.(3)The status of the development of Chinese HSR and the theoretical framework of the impact of HSR on urban economic growth.(4)We summarize the direct and indirect effects of HSR in the following four aspects.(a)HSR extends the scope of urban economic hinterland.(b)HSR enhances investment facilitation between cities.(c)HSR extends the distance between passengers' workplace and residence.(d)HSR mitigates traffic congestion of other transportation systems.What is more,this part incorporates the factor of transportation efficiency to the established theoretical model of economic growth to examine how this factor may enhance economic growth and regional growth convergence.Our theoretical model is based on the endogenous economic growth model employed by Yao and Zhang(2001b).Empirical study about HSR,urban economic growth and regional convergence in China.This part explains why HSR construction not only contributes to faster economic growth but also promotes regional economic convergence,facilitating China to sustain its long-term economic growth.We establish an empirical model to testify two hypotheses: Firstly,HSR promotes economic growth for all the cities;Secondly,HSR accelerates economic convergence among the cities.The empirical results show that both the cross-section and panel-data regressions support our hypotheses.Further robustness tests based on regional as well as paired-regions data generate consistent results.The findings of this chapter have important policy implications in the sense that basic infrastructure development,particularly the development of HSR,is important for stimulating regional economic growth and convergence in China.(5)Empirical study about the role of HSR development on total asset investment in China.This part constructs an econometric model to estimate the effect of HSR on total social fixed asset investment in China.It also deploys the difference-in-difference(DID)as well as the propensity score matching DID methods to verify the results,which show that HSR significantly accelerates fixed asset investments for the whole country,foreign direct investment and investment in the real estate sector.Because of the operation of HSR,the investment increase rate of the cities in the nation,east,central and west increases 2.2%,1.5%,7% and 4.2% annually,respectively.More interestingly,HSR construction does not displace the investments in other industries,instead,it stimulates them.Our research findings lend an important theoretical support to China's medium-long term HSR investment plan.(6)The empirical study about the impact of HSR development on population migration.Using 1% population sampling survey data,this chapter builds a difference-in-difference(DID)model,and a propensity score matching DID model to verify the causality between HSR and population migration.It identifies the proxy variable of population migration and employs OLS regression to verify the impact of HSR operation on population migration.The results show that HSR operation clearly accelerates population migration,inducing significant change in China's population migration pattern.(7)The last part concludes.This research has the following key findings and contributions to the literature.(1)It employs both theoretical and empirical models to explain how HSR may have affected economic growth and regional economic convergence across China using a large panel dataset covering all the country's prefecture-level cities over the period 2009-2014.(2)It studies the economic externalities of HRS.The economic externalities include not only its impact on economic growth but also its impact on the overall efficiency of the national transportation system.In particular,it explains how HSR may have affected the travel time and improved the inter-regional flows of passengers,information and other production factors.(3)It explores the influencing factors and transmission mechanism of HSR on economic growth and convergence from the two major production factors of physical capital and human capital.That is,analyse the impact of HSR on the fixed assets investment of the whole society quantitatively from the change of the investment amount.In addition,it uses 1% population sampling survey data and proves the positive impact of the HSR operation on the accelerating population migration.It not only enriches the researches of HSR economics,but also enhances the understanding of the mechanism of HSR effect.It uses different research methods and econometric approaches to prove the same phenomenon,that is,how HSR has promoted urban economic growth and accelerated regional economic convergence.It also examines the impact of HSR on investment,interregional migration and investments.