Transportation Infrastructure And Urban Economic Development:Theoretical Mechanism And Empirical Research

With the rapid progress of urbanization,the role of China’s urban economy in the national economy has become increasingly prominent.In 2011,China entere d the “urban era”,and urban and regional issues have become one of the core issues of government concern.At the same time,China’s urban development process faces problems such as low level of labor skill matching and unreasonable division of labor between cities.The urban network system is still under construction.The gap between urban and rural public services and infrastructure is obvious,and the urbanization process is difficult to meet the requirements of industrialization process.The report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out: In developing a modernized economy,we must focus on the real economy,give priority to improving the quality of the supply system,and enhance our economy’s strength in terms of quality,and we will strengthen infrastructure networks for water conservancy,railways,highways,waterways,aviation,pipelines,power grids,information,and logistics.In this context,in-depth study and discussion on how transportation infrastructure can improve the level of division of labor between cities and improve the matching of labor skills has important theoretical and practical significance for enhancing the coordination of regional economic development and promoting high-quality development.Firstly,by constructing the corresponding theoretical model and using national industrial enterprise data and urban panel data,this paper empirically test the synergy effect of spatial function division and transportation infrastructure on labor productivity.The study found that the development of regional transportation infrastructure can significantly reduce the cost of coordination in different places,enhance the specialization of spatial function division,and the development of transportation infrastructure has a more obvious effect on the functional division of space in manufacturing cities.There are obvious industry differences in the impact of traffic conditions and spatial function division on enterprise productivity: the improvement of regional traffic conditions will help to improve the spatial function division of labor in low-tech industries.In addition,there is a long time lag between the completion of the expressway and the division of space function: usually after the highway is built for many years,the enterprises in the relevant cities obviously gain the benefits of the evolution of the spatial function division.Secondly,Based on the recent research,this paper re-examines the space-related effects of manufacturing in the urban system by using the upstream and downstream industrial spatial correlation and urban level and network effect models and Chinese industrial enterprise data.The research results confirm that the network c ompetition in the urban agglomeration is more intense,the upstream industry is more dependent on the extra-group market,and the downstream industry obviously benefits from the development of the upstream industry within the group;the economic growth of the central city within the group inhibits the development of other cities’ manufacturing industries.The results also show that transportation infrastructure and urban networks work synergistically in the urban industrial economy,promoting manufacturing growth in most cities and promoting the de-industrialization of developed cities.Thirdly,transport condition directly affect labor mobility costs and skill matching levels.This paper has introduce labor skill matching into a transport condition-urban scale-productivity model and examine the impact of transport infrastructure and skill matching on firm productivity,using national industrial enterprise data.The results show that: improving transport conditions and enhancing skills training lead to improvements of productivity;transport infrastructure,urban size and skills training have substitutive effects;improving transport conditions and expanding urban scale can significantly enhance the positive impact of skills matching on productivity.The econometric tests of high,medium and low technology industries reveal that,the impacts of transport condition and skills matching on firm productivity differ across high-,medium-,and low-tech industries and across cities with different scales;improving transport conditions tend to improve the productivity of high-tech industries in mega-scale cities,thereby promoting high-tech industrial agglomeration into mega cities,while pushing the low tech industry transfer from mega cities to the other smaller cities.Finally,this paper briefly discusses the implications of the research findings in the formulation and evaluation of economic development and structural adjustment policies.Finally,this paper constructs a traffic cost function including road network density and vehicle density,analyzes the optimization problem s of urban residents and manufacturers,sets up the urban economic efficiency model,and uses the panel data estimates of 266 prefecture-level cities and above in China from 2003 to 2013.The measurement model.The estimation results show that:(1)Road network density has a significant nonlinear impact on urban labor productivity.As the density of vehicles increases,the contribution of road network density t o urban productivity will be reduced.At present,the elasticity of urban road network density in China’s labor productivity is about 0.0211.(2)The impact of road network density and vehicle density on labor productivity is closely related to the size of urban commercial areas and industrial areas.The larger the scale of urban commercial areas and i ndustrial areas,the more obvious the effect of road network density on labor productivity.(3)There are significant regional differences in the impact of urban road network density on labor productivity.Under the condition that the average density of ve hicles in the eastern and western cities is average,the elasticity of urban road network density to labor productivity in the eastern and western regions is-0.0664 and 0.0369,respectively.Moreover,with the increasing density of vehicles,the suppressi on of labor productivity in the eastern region is more obvious,and the increase in vehicle density in the western region will help increase the scale economy of road network transportation and increase labor productivity.(4)The “narrow road,dense road network” model helps to alleviate the traffic congestion in large cities in the commercial district and improve the road passing capacity of metropolitan area s with dense traffic flow.