An Study On The Influence Of The Infrastructure In The Central And Western China On Economic Growth

Since reform and opening up, the economy in central and western China hasdeveloped dramatically, but at the same time the economic gap between central andwestern regions and eastern China that occupies the geographical advantage isincreasingly expanding. In order to promote economic development of central andwestern regions and narrow the gap with eastern China, the governments of centraland western regions have proposed the city group strategy with the support of thecentral government’ s policy. They have invested large number of capital whose mainform is infrastructure. However, how is the actual effect of the city group strategywhich is widely adopted currently? Does the city groups’ infrastructure of central andwestern China promote or inhibit their hinterlands’ economic development? Shouldthere be other co-ordinate measures when the city group strategy is adopted?The study is based on spread-backwash theory of growth pole and uses spaceeconometric approach to analyze the relationship between a city’s infrastructure andits economic growth as well as the affect that the city’s infrastructure puts on itshinterlands’ economic development with all1,584cities in central and western China(excluding Tibet) as the sample. First of all, we define the concept of infrastructure,city group and central city, expound spread-backwash theory of growth pole and thenanalyze impact mechanism between city group’s infrastructure and economic growth.After that, we build a model that reflects infrastructure’s impact on economic growthdepending on production function and do fixed effects model analysis with the sampledata. The results show Infrastructure has significant promotion to economicgrowth.The infrastructure of the central cities has positive or negative spillover onthe economic growth of the other cities if the distance differs; The infrastructure ofthe cities around the central cities has positive spillover on the economic growth ofthe central cities; The spatial spillover is negative between the county-level units. TheIndustry cooperation and resource competition situation between different citiescauses the difference of the spatial spillover. In conclusion, we put forward thecorresponding implications of the findings on the basis of the theoretical analysis andempirical results.