A Study On The Relationship Between China 's Transport Infrastructure And Regional Economic Convergence

Since the reform and opening up, China’s average annual growth rate of real GDP reached9.89%from1979to2011, creating the so-called "China miracle". At the same time, regional disparity has continued to expand, and becomes a hot topic of society. Transport infrastructure mainly affects economic growth through two ways:on the one hand, it is a kind of investment, the investment can promote economic growth directly; On the other hand, it has spillover effects, positive spillover effect helps to narrow the regional disparity, while negative spillover effect leads the backward areas of natural resources, labor and other factors of production flowing to developed areas, eventually expanding the regional disparity. So just rely on experience judgment "to get rich, first build roads" is unscientific, studying the relationship of transportation infrastructure and economic growth, regional disparity is very important.Our country transportation infrastructure network density diminishing in the eastern region, central region and western region, the western region’s transport infrastructure quality generally inferior to the eastern region, substandard highways and low grade proportion is higher. In addition, after the implementation of western development, western region on the amount of transport infrastructure has improved significantly, but the gap has been widening, the backward transport infrastructure eventually leads to the gap of economic development.In the framework of Barrow economic growth model, this paper adopts the Chinese provincial panel data from1993to2011in the empirical analysis of the impact of transport infrastructure for regional economic disparity. Results show that different types of transport infrastructure promote economic growth and improve the economic convergence speed, narrow the gap in economic development. Railway transport infrastructure is better than the general effect of the highway traffic infrastructure; Lower quality road is not conducive to economic growth, and expands regional economic development gap. The implementation of the western development causes the west economic growth higher than the east、middle region about1%, promoting regional economic growth convergence. There is a significant conditional convergence in china’s regional economic. In addition, physical capital, human capital, the improvement of investment environment has significantly promoted the regional economic growth. Finally, I put forward the corresponding policy recommendations based on the empirical findings:First, it is necessary to deepen the western development strategy, speed up the development of transportation infrastructure construction; Second, to improve the soft environment of the western region, to strengthen the acceptance capability of the industry.