Research On The Relationship Between Freight Growth And Economic Growth

As an important part of transportation，freight belongs to as well as serves the socialeconomic system. Freight provides backup and guarantees for the development of the society.The purpose of the research on the relationship between freight growth and economic growthis to explore and discover the inherent contact and discipline between them. So we canprovide advice on how to promote the development of freight, and how to accelerate theeconomic growth.The paper based on the theory of transport economics and econometrics and adopts themethods that combine the theoretical analysis with the empirical studies, the quantitative withqualitative analysis and the vertical contrasts with horizontal comparison. Take America andChina as two case studies in this paper. This paper tries to explain three layers of therelationship between freight growth and economic growth: causal relationship between them,whether freight is an economic leading indicator or not and the long-term trend in freightgrowth with the economic growth. Firstly, a qualitative description about the above threelayers was given. Then, quantitative methods has been used to examine the above three layers.This paper uses co-integration theory and Granger causality tests to explore the causalrelationship between them, use the compilation of China Transportation Services Indexverified that freight is an economic leading indicator, and use hypothesis of Kuznets curveexamined the long-term trend in freight growth.The conclusion indicates that there exists a causal relationship between freight growthand economic growth, represents alternately push-and-pull to each other, and show differentforms at different stages of economic development. The analysis of freight transportationservices index (freight TSI) has proved that freight TSI is a leading indicator of economy, itcan be used to track and predict economic fluctuation in real time dynamically. In theory,"transportation al" theory proved that the long-term trend in freight growth with the economicgrowth agrees to hypothesis of Kuznets curve. The empirical analysis of America and Chinashows that the freight moves in a spiral line. According to the analysis of America, weconcluded that the volume of freight in the post-industrialization stage may not be decreased,it may slow ascendant trend.