Research On The Influence Path Of Economic Corridors

Since the rapid growth in the coastal regions as a result of the opening to the west policiesCentral and West China are lagging behind the developed coastal regions. This imbalancecauses social instability and illegal migration within China. New development policies wereimplemented by the Chinese government to address problems concerning these increasingregional inequalities. In particular the Western Development Strategy (WDS, xi bu da kai faor西部大开发in Chinese) in1999. One of the key issues in the inequality is the linkagebetween these regions. An economic corridor running from the coast towards the internalregions can be a manner to address these issues.By using four case studies the aim of this research is firstly to better understand thecharacteristics of and mechanisms in an economic corridor, secondly to create a model of aneconomic corridor based on these lessons which can be used to formulate sustainable policiesto transform a region into a better economic corridor, and thirdly to empirically test the modelon the Yangtze region in China. The definition of a corridor based on literature is a cluster ofinterconnected concentrations of economic activity along a main transportation axis. Thisdefinition is used to select the four corridor case studies:1) Small scale corridors,2) the BlueBanana,3) the Greater Mekong Subregion, and4) the America2050Mega regions. Thecharacteristics that can be found in all four case studies include the high degree ofaccessibility, the presence of bundles of infrastructure, the usage of multimodal transport inthe region, and that corridors influence the regional equality. With these findings an economiccorridor model is build that shows how an economic corridor works and how it can be usefulin stimulating economic development. The result of this research is a generic corridor modelthat fulfils the requirements concerning sustainability. This corridor model can be used to aidand steer policy makers on formulating development policies for corridor-like regions. Thiscorridor model is tested on the Yangtze region, but can also be used for other regions.