Research On The Impact Of Infrastructure Construction On Tourism Economy

Improvement of transport infrastructure can promote the development of regional economy. As a part of transport infrastructure, High-speed Railway(Abbreviation: “High-speed Rail”) have certain impacts on the development of tourism economy. Thus, quantitative analysis of the impact on the tourism economy of High-speed Railway is necessary. This paper does quantitative research on the impact of the Wuhan-Guangzhou High-speed Railway(Abbreviation:“Wuhan-Guangzhou High-speed Rail”) on the development of tourism economic. The opening of "Wuhan-Guangzhou High-speed Rail" in 2009 can be seen as a quasi-natural experiment which improved the quality of transport infrastructure.From transverse perspective,in order to figure out whether the high-speed rail station has effect on the local tourism economy, this paper selected the cities with the docking site of "Wuhan-Guangzhou High-speed Rail" as the experimental group, cities chosen from the same province as the experimental group,without any high-speed rail station as the control group,constructed 2005-2013 panel data, the use of DID(difference in differences) method examines the impact of the opening of"Wuhan-Guangzhou High-speed Rail” on the tourism industry.The result shows that tourism revenue in cities from treatment group increased by 13.734 billion to 22.482 billion yuan, and the total number of domestic tourist arrivals increased by 12.9814 million to 16.2512 million people.On the other hand, by calculating Gini coefficient, this paper measured longitudinal differences of tourism economy among 10 cities which have high-speed rail station. Conclusions show that transportation infrastructure conducive to the promotion of tourism growth. However,because of the difference of tourism infrastructure in different places, even in the case of simultaneous construction of the railway, there are still large gaps among different cities.In this paper, we study the impact of high-speed rail on tourism economy through the macro view, and make up the deficiency of the domestic research on the development of tourism.