High-Speed Railway,City Network And Economic Growth Effects In China

Transportation infrastructure construction is one of the social leading capital for industrial development and economic take-off.Since the reform and opening up,the pace of people’s social activities has accelerated,and the re quirements for shortening travel time have been increasing.From 1990 to 1991,China began to plan for high-speed rail technology research and test practice.In 2003,China’s Qinhuangdao Shenyang passenger dedicated line was officially put into operation,which is the starting point for China’s railway to enter high-speed.China attaches great importance to the layout planning of high-speed railway network.In 2004,the medium and long-term railway network planning was formulated,which was revised in 2008 and 2016.In 2016,it was proposed to form a high-speed railway network dominated by "eight vertical and eight horizontal" based on the main framework of "four vertical and four horizontal" in the original planning.Since the implementation of the plan,China’s railway development has made great achievements.Its important role in economic and social development,improvement and protection of people’s livelihood,improvement of China’s international influence and support for the implementation of major nati onal strategies has attracted worldwide attention.By the end of 2020,the operating mileage of China’s high-speed railway has reached 37900 kilometers,which exceeds 2 / 3 of the global high-speed railway operating length,connecting major provincial capitals,municipalities directly under the central government and special economic zones.Infrastructure investment plays a very important role in China’s investment driven economic growth model.In fact,the contribution of infrastructure to economic growth has received a lot of theoretical analysis and empirical tests.Although some previous studies have explored the economics of China’s railway transportation infrastructure,most of the previous studies mainly focused on macroeconomic indicators,and there is few researches on the impact on the micro-level.At the same time,as the development of the high-speed railway network is still in the emerging stage,the evaluation of its economic benefits needs to be strengthened.In particular,the impact of changes in the centrality and accessibility of the high-speed railway network nodes on the urban economy is still rarely studied.Therefore,on the basis of urban macro level research,this study will further focus on the micro mechanism of the impact of traffic infrastructure on economic growth,and take the development of high-speed railway network as the starting point to discuss how the integration of the city into the high-speed railway network and its node characteristics in the high-speed railway network affect the economic growth of Chinese cities from both macro and micro perspectives.Based on the changes in time distance brought about by the high-speed railway network,this paper establishes a mathematical model of the impact of high-speed railway on urban economic growth,and at the same time constructs a theoretical framework for the impact of high-speed railway on firm innovation and performance from a micro perspective.On the basis of describing the evolution of China’s city network from the perspective of the high-speed railway network,it also explored the impact of the high-speed railway network on the spatial structure of regional economy,and found the correlation between the high-speed railway network and the urban economic network.Furthermore,this article regards the high-speed railway network as a "quasi-natural experiment",taking the non-target cities and the listed companies in the high-speed railway network as the research objects,using the DID model,from the macro and micro levels to estimate the impact of the high-speed railway network on urban economic growth,it not only analyzes the impact of the city’s integration into the high-speed railway network,but also examines the impact mechanism of the centrality and the accessibility on China’s economic growth.Finally,this article provides policy recommendations for high-speed railway construction,urban development and firm growth.The empirical research results of this paper show that: from the perspective of meso urban growth,China’s city network under the "high-speed rail flow space" economic system shows an upward trend.Compared with the ordinary railway network,the high-speed rail network makes the element communication efficiency between city network nodes higher and the urban accessibility greatly improved,but there are still obvious differences between regions.From the perspective of enterprise scale,after enterprises integrate into high-speed railway,enterprise performance has been significantly improved.This improvemen t is realized through the agglomeration of high-speed railway network on scientific researchers,and the improvement of centrality and accessibility can also bring the same results,which shows that high-speed railway network has a positive effect on micro enterprise growth,which is obtained by improving the innovation ability of enterprises to a certain extent.From the perspective of urban spatial scale,high-speed railway strengthens the economic connection between cities,and the high-speed railway network has a positive correlation with the economic connection network between cities in China,while the correlation intensity between different urban agglomerations is different.Through the empirical test,it is found that with the opening of high-speed railway lines and the improvement of urban scale hierarchical network structure,it can have a significant positive growth effect on urban employment,employee wages and the overall economy,and the growth effect of high-speed railway network on the overall urban economy should have spatial and scale heterogeneity,which provides an explanation path for the unbalanced development of regional economy in China.This study discovers the advantageous effects of the development of high-speed railway,and verifies the macro and micro influence mechanism of high-speed railway on urban growth,and also analyzed the role of network centrality and accessibility characteristics that promote the growth of cities and enterprises,which are rarely seen in the research.It provides another reliable basis for the evaluation of the effect of high-speed railway network construction.In the future development,high-speed railway planners should pay more attention to the time sequence of high-speed rail network construction to provide a path to reduce regional development differences;urban managers should actively integrate into the high-speed rail network and give full play to the "same city effect" and "node effect" of high-speed rail;enterprise managers should actively take advantage of the opportunities of industrial association development brought by high-speed rail network to increase the attraction to scientific researchers.