Reserch On High-speed Rail Projects And Urban Economic Development Of China

The construction of high-speed rail(HSR for short)is one of China’s largest transportation infrastructure projects in the 21 st century.HSR projects have the comprehensive advantages of faster speed,strong timeliness,network effect and economies of scale,compared with other railways,highways and air transportation.These advantages make HSR increasingly become an important transportation infrastructure connecting cities and regions,expected to have a multi-dimensional and in-depth impact on urban economic development.This research uses a large panel data set comprising 285 Chinese cities from 2007 to 2018 to study the impact of HSR on urban economic development.(1)This research mainly focuses on the following three questions:1)Can HSR accelerate urban economic growth by strengthening the spillovers between cities?2)Can HSR decrease the mismatch and incoordination of industry and labor distributions by facilitating laborers’ migration?3)Can HSR promote the development of urban level domestic trade by enhancing the intercity economic gravity?(2)The main contents of this research are as follows:The contents of this research mainly include Introduction,Literature Review,Empirical Research and Conclusion,consisting of seven chapters.Chapter 1 is the Introduction,which mainly introduces the research background,puts forward the research questions,introduces the research content,methods and structure,introduces the research significance,innovations and shortcomings,and defines the important concepts of this research.Chapter 2 is the Literature Review,reviewing the economic growth theory and convergence hypothesis,the core-periphery theory of regional development,and the literature on the impact of infrastructure on economic development.This chapter provides the theoretical basis for the empirical research.Chapters 3-6 are the empirical research chapters,which include 3 parts corresponding to the above 3 research questions.Chapters 3 and 4 are the first part of the empirical research,corresponding to the first research question.This part studies the role of HSR in promoting urban economic growth from the perspective of strengthening spillovers.Chapter 3 first proposes a theoretical model to analyze the impact of HSR’s space-time compression on economic growth.Secondly,this chapter sets the identification strategy of this research,which is based on the cross-classification standard of economic development level and administrative level.The 285 sample cities are divided into two city groups,i.e.64 developed leading cities and 221 developing following cities,and different growth centers are defined for each of the two city groups.Finally,this chapter uses the intertemporal difference-difference approach to test the impact of HSR’s space-time compression on urban economic growth.Chapter 4,on the basis of Chapter 3,further introduces the layer-processing method to test the nonlinearity and effective boundary of HSR’s effect on promoting economic growth.Chapter 5 is the second part of the empirical research,corresponding to the second research question.This chapter studies the role of HSR in decreasing the mismatch of industry and labor distributions by facilitating laborers’ migration.Based on the existing literature,this chapter proposes that the mismatch of industry and labor distributions leads to an unbalanced spatial development structure.This chapter sets city-level mismatch indicators of the tertiary industry and the secondary industry and uses them to study the impact of HSR on promoting the coordinated development of the industrial structure.Chapter 6 is the third part of the empirical research,corresponding to the third research question.This chapter studies the role of HSR in promoting the development of domestic trade from the perspective of enhancing the intercity economic gravity.Based on the existing literature,this chapter uses the gravity model to set the MG variable to investigate the spatial interaction effect of HSR,and uses this variable to test the direct mechanism of HSR’s effect on urban level domestic trade.Then this chapter proposes and examines the two indirect mechanisms of HSR’s effect on urban level domestic trade.Chapter 7 is the Conclusion,which summarizes the main findings and conclusions of this research,and proposes policy recommendations and future directions.(3)The main findings and conclusions of this research are as follows:1)The driving force of urban growth can be encouraged by spillovers from growth centers.The spillovers are usually constrained by friction arising from geographical distances,which decline as distances increase.With the implementation of HSR,the travel times from a city to its growth center can be shortened,making cities closer to the time dimension.This is the so-called space-time compression effect of HSR.As a result,HSR can weaken the friction of geographical barriers,enhancing the spillovers of growth centers and promoting economic growth in cities connected by HSR.2)The effect of HSR’s space-time compression on promoting urban economic growth is not linear or boundlessly effective,affected by the friction of spatial and geographic distances.As the distances from a city to its growth center increase,the effect of HSR present a nonlinear trend that first increases and then decreases.After the distances exceed the effective boundary,the effect of HSR is no longer significant.3)Besides,HSR can decrease the mismatch and incoordination of industry and labor distributions by facilitating laborers’ migration,thus promoting the coordinated development of the industrial structure.For the developed leading cities,HSR mainly reduces the mismatch in the tertiary industry.While for the developing following cities,HSR can simultaneously reduce the mismatches in both the tertiary industry and the secondary industry.4)Moreover,HSR can directly promote the development of domestic trade of the following cities by strengthening the intercity economic gravity.In addition to this direct mechanism,there are also two indirect mechanisms.The first indirect mechanism is that HSR can promote the development of domestic trade by promoting the development of the tertiary industry.The second indirect mechanism is that HSR can raise housing prices to some certain extent,which is against the development of domestic trade.However,after comprehensively controlling the one positive and one negative indirect mechanisms,HSR generally plays a significant role in promoting the development of city-level domestic trade.5)HSR has higher positive effects on the developing following cities,compared with the developed leading cities.In other words,HSR can accelerate the developing cities to catch up with the developed ones,thus promoting coordinated economic development.As a result,HSR can contribute to building a more unblocked and integrated domestic economic cycle.