The Impact Of High-speed Railway Opening On Urban Environmental Pollution—Based On A Quasi-natural Experiment

The development of high-speed rail(HSR)is a breakthrough and revolution of transportation technology,which plays an important role in economic development and environmental pollution.According to current condition of high-speed rail and environmental pollution,the number of cities with HSR is increasing,which mainly in eastern and middle area.Air pollution is the most serious environmental problem.The air quality is the best in Southeastern coastal areas,while North China is the opposite.With more attention to environment,environmental governance become important,the researches of environmental pollution is also increasing.In consideration of the fast development of transportation,especially HSR leads the world,but there exsists fewer researches that make HSR as one of the influence factor s.Therefore,the paper can replenish the research field and better analyse the effcts of environmental and economic.This paper firstly elaborates the current condition of HSR and environmental pollution.Secondly,the thesis expounds the direct and indirect influence mechanism of HSR on environmental pollution,the former including direct pollution effect and substitution effect,the latter including income effect,technology effect and structure effect.Further,with the opening of the HSR as a quasi-natural experiment,this paper uses data from 270 prefecture-level cities of China during the year 2003-2016,in which the treatment group compring cities with HSR,the control group comprising cities without HSR.Then,the paper put forwards a difference-in-difference model to discuss the net effect of environmental pollution,which passed parallel trend test.The empirical evidence shows that the opening of HSR is beneficial to the improvement of urban air pollution,and the pollution level of urban environment will decrease by about 23.35%.And the result is proved to be steady by robustness checks of changing explained variable and sample range and assigning cities redomly.Further,the paper implements mediation analysis and heterogeneity analysis by “Two-control-zone” policy,city size and regional difference.In addition,this paper finds that there is a reversed-U shape relationship between the city’s economic development level and environmental pollution,which means there exists “Environment Kuznets Curve”,and industrial pollution is still an important pollution source.To sum up,increasing investment in science and education will help reduce pollution.In order to play a vital role of HSR in environment,this paper proposes corresponding policy recommendations.First of all,we should reasonably promote the construction and overall planning of high-speed rail,motivate the driving effect of HSR on regional economic development and environment improvement.Finally,we should further improve environmental governance policies,optimize industrial structure and enhance the ability of technological innovation.