Study On The Infrastructure Investment And Economic Development Of The West Minority Region

Infrastructure is related to social product and development, quality of life of residents and the basic social welfare issues. Infrastructure development also reflects the economic development level of a country or a region. Theoretical studies have shown that the infrastructure plays main role for economic development in real terms and inadequate infrastructure will constraints the regional economic development. Since the implementation of the strategy of developing the western region, the development of infrastructure construction becomes one of the focus of the strategy and provided a good opportunity for the infrastructure construction of western region. With the great western development strategy for the continuous progress, the CPC Central Committee , the State Council and local people's governments at all levels in the western region provides strong support on investment and policy for the western region and the infrastructure construction of Western ethnic minority areas has made substantial progress. The serious shortage of infrastructure is improved and the "bottleneck" constraints of infrastructure development on the local economy have eased, but the current infrastructurewith of the western region can not satisfy the needs of economic development due to the economically backward western region caused by historical, geographical, natural , social and other factors,for example, the poor base of infrastructure construction and the current construction that clearly is a debt repayment for the history. At the same time, because some main factors ,such as low level of construction, shortage of funds, the single principal and low level of market-oriented hinder the development of the western region's infrastructure construction, the economic development in ethnic minority area is constrainted. Based on above factors, Specific and detailed analysis on the relations between the infrastructure investment of western region and the economical development is helpful to understand the present situation and existence problems of the infrastructure development of western region and strengthen the attention to the infrastructure. And the related institutional arrangements and countermeasure simultaneously figure out from the analysis may provide a reference of policy-making and valuable suggestion on infrastructure construction of western ethnic minority area.This paper started with the theory of infrastructure, introduced the definition of the concept of infrastructure, domestic and international theoretical research on infrastructure, and stated the relation between infrastructure and the development of the economy. The concept of infrastructure including the physical infrastructure and institutional infrastructure, it is a generalized infrastructure. The predecessor theory research suggested that the infrastructure construction plays an essential and main role in promoting the development of economy. Then the paper analyzed the infrastructure construction and the development of the economy. It analyzed the present condition of the infrastructure in the western region, definitely stated the western area's infrastructure construction has obtained certain achievement, also pointed out the problems that existed in the construction simultaneously and definitely stated that infrastructure play great promotive role in the west development. The promotive founctions showed in the following aspects: The continuous increase of infrastructure investment resulted in a greater investment demand and stimulated the growth the fixed assets investment and the region's GDP. Infrastructure construction in the western Ethnic minority areas promoted structural optimization and industrial development. Educational infrastructure investment promoted the development of education of western ethnic minority area , expanded the education range of the western region, improved the level of education and the level of public education, and provided the human resource for the development of the economy in the western region. Infrastructure development improved the living and working condition in the western ethnic area, directly or indirectly increased the income of the poor population, and promoted the western region of the anti-poverty progress. At last, the papers analysised the sources of infrastructure funding of the western region and pointed out that the western region of infrastructure investment was still government-led. The dependence of infrastructure construction of the western region was greatly on Government and the infrastructure construction in the western region was at a low level of market-oriented, so the function of the market in the allocation of resources was not effective and the source of funds was in a narrow channel. In addition, there were still some problems on the use of the infrastructure investment, such as the decentralized use of investment in infrastructure, a low utilization rate, serious "leakage effect" on the infrastructure investment in some major project, a smaller role in stimulating the local economy. To address the issues raised above ,the institutional arrangements and policy options for the development of infrastructure of the western region were given in this paper.