The Impacts Of Urban Transport Infrastructure And Its Spatial Effects On Economic Efficiency

The urban transport infrastructures have been improved in the the process of urbanization in China. It was got more attention that economic development through increasing economic efficiency along with our country put forward the transformation of economic development. Transport infrastructures have always been considered to promote economic efficiency, and with the transport infrastructure's improving, transportation's contribution to the economic efficiency also gradually be focused on seriously.This paper is to analysis the impacts of urban t ransport infrastructure on economic efficiency and its spillovers. First, this paper clarified the influence mechanism of urban transport infrastructure on economic efficiency and the formation mechanism of its spillovers based on the existing research and related theories. Second, this paper analysis the status quo of the urban transport infrastructures and economic efficiency. Finally, this paper did an empirical research on the impacts of urban transport infrastructure and its spatial effects on economic efficiency using a panel data of 282 prefectural cities in China from year 2003 to 2012 with two step GMM-IV estimation employed.Theoretical analysis reveals that urban transport infrastructures have impacts and spatial effects on economic efficiency. The impacts of urban transport infrastructures on economic efficiency were derived from the urban traffic facilities to reduce the influence of the city's transportation cost, optimize the allocation of resources, and promote urban agglomeration economy and so on. The positive spatial effects on economic efficiency were derived from elements flow between the cities because of urban improvement, the spread of technology cities, the allocation of urban resources, while the negative spatial effects from the backflows of advanced technology a high quality factors.In the analysis of status quo of the urban transport infrastructure and economic efficiency, we use urban per capita road area, city bus number per ten thousand people and freight volume to reflect urban transportation infrastructure, urban public transport facilities and logistics facilities conditions and scale respectively. We use stochastic frontier production function model to estimate the urban economic efficiency in China. The results reveal that the urban transport infrastructure and the urban economic efficiency are improving steadily and have obvious regional difference.With the spatial lag of economic efficiency and urban transport infrastructure, this paper established a spatial econometric model to empirically research the impacts of the urban transport infrastructure and its spatial effects on economic efficiency using a panel data of 282 prefectural cities in China from year 2003 to 2012, with two step GMM-IV estimation employed. The results of empirical research shows that: 1) There is no significant spatial spillover effects of economic efficiency in northeastern China, while is in other regions; 2) The urban transport infrastructures have positive impacts on economic efficiency in every region in China, but the impacts have significant regional differences; 3) The urban transport infrastructures have significantly positive spatial effects on economic efficiency in every region in China. It means that a city's improvement of transport infrastructures help improving the economic efficiency of other cities surrounding. But the intensity of the spatial effects has regional difference.